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Evolution in a Nutshell 



























Evolution in a Nutshell 


The Pro and Con Briefly, Clearly and 
Fully Presented 


By 

ALVIN SYLVESTER ZERBE, Ph. D., D. D. 

Central Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio 


CHICAGO: 

LAIRD & LEE, Inc. 

PUBLISHERS 

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3'L 2jU3 

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Copyright, 1926 
By LAIRD & LEE, INC. 
Printed in the United States of America 


APR 23*26 


© Cl A 890448 

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A BOOK FOR BUSY BUT INQUIRING 
* MEN AND WOMEN 

TN keeping with the spirit of progress in the present age, the 
subject of evolution has acquired increasing, interest and 
importance and is rapidly shaping thought not only in every 
department of science, as physics, chemistry, biology and psy¬ 
chology, but also in government, education and religion. The 
Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, last summer, taxed the re¬ 
sources of able men of all shades of opinion and was advertised 
throughout the length and breadth of the land. Elaborate 
arguments were presented on both sides; newspaper correspond¬ 
ents wired fact and fiction; and the stage setting was ludicrously 
spectacular. Little was settled. 

Unfortunately the real merits and underlying issues were 
not definitely formulated or exhaustively argued. As a result, 
the public in general and otherwise well-informed persons have 
been left in a state of doubt and perplexity as to the facts and 
truths of the matter. The Scopes trial, however, was only an 
incident, one phase of a widespread uneasiness concerning the 
real nature and scope of what is called evolution—a state of 
mind due largely to the fact that writers have uniformly failed 
to explain what evolution is and what it is not. 

It is clear that the problem has taken such a wide range and 
involves the facts and discoveries in so many fields of inquiry 
that it cannot be settled off-hand, but requires an encyclopedic 
knowledge and grasp of contemporaneous science and philosophy. 

This little book aims to present within the lowest possible 
limits consistent with clearness the chief arguments pro and con, 
dispassionately and in accord with ascertained facts. It is pre¬ 
pared by one who, having studied in the chief universities of this 
country and of Europe and having taught, written and lectured 
many years on the subject, is presumably qualified to reflect the 
latest and maturest scientific thought. 

January, 1926. The Publishers. 


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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

The Theory of Evolution 

1. The Term Evolution Defined. 15 

2. Evolution as Growth or Development from a Germinal to a 

Mature State . 15 

3. Evolution as Denoting Continuity, Uniformity and an Entirely 

Intrinsic and Materialistic Process. 16 

4. Evolution as an Intrinsic Transition from the Homogeneous to 

the Heterogeneous . 18 

5. The Current Theory of Evolution an Old Naturalism. 19 

6. The Newtonian and the Laplacean Viewpoints. 20 

7. The True Inwardness of the Current Theory of Evolution.... 20 

CHAPTER II 
The Theory of Creation 

1. Three Pivotal Points . 22 

2. The Creative Days in Outline. 23 

3. Fiat Creation . 24 

4. The Creation of Man. 24 

5. Length of the Creative Days. 25 

6. Creation ex Nihilo. 26 

7. The Biblical and the Babylonian Cosmogonies. 27 

CHAPTER III 

Chief Lines of Proof of Evolution 

A. Geology 

1. The Paleozoic Era . 29 

2. The Mesozoic Era . 31 

3. The Cenozoic or Tertiary Era. 31 

4. The Pleistocene or Glacial Era. 32 

5. Life in the Pleistocene Era. 32 

B. Comparative Anatomy 

1. The Argument from Similarity of Structure. 34 

2. Physical Differences between Man and the Higher Animals- 35 

3. Anatomical Differences between Man and the Ape. 36 

C. Embryology 

1. Conflicting Evidence . 38 

2. Theory of Germinal Variation . 38 

3. The Human Eye . 39 

4. Biology and the Cell. 39 

5. The Cell in High-school and College Text-Books. 41 

6. The Organism More than the Cell. 42 

xi 




























xii Evolution in a Nutshell 


D. Genetics—Lazos of Heredity 

1. Are there New Species?. ^ 

2. The Non-Transmission of Acquired Characteristics. 44 

3. Mendel’s Revolutionary Discovery. 45 

CHAPTER IV 

Is the Doctrine of Evolution a Satisfactory and Comprehensive 

World-View? 

A. The Sphere of Matter-Force 

1. Difference between Creation and Evolution. 48 

2. Matter and Energy . 49 

3. Is Matter-Energy Eternal?. 50 

4. Molecular Motion .* . 51 

5. The Universe as a Self-originated and Self-running Machine... 52 

6. Perpetual Motion . 53 

7. The Physical Universe Not Eternal. 53 

8. Origin of Matter—Summary. 54 

B. Sphere of Life 

1. Dilemma of Evolutionists on the Origin of Life. 54 

2. Vain Attempts to Solve the Riddle of Life. 56 

3. Life and Not-Life . 56 

4. What is Biogenesis?. 57 

5. Cows’ Milk Manufactured according to Henry Ford. 58 

6. Life a Rejuvenation, Not a Creation, Says Science. 58 

7. Strange Bedfellows at the Scopes Trial. 61 

(a) Professor Mather’s Viewpoint. 61 

(b) Viewpoint of Attorney Clarence Darrow. 62 

(c) Liberals and the Devil’s Broth at Dayton. 64 

8. Mechanism and Vitalism . 65 

9. Wide Gap between Vital and Non-Vital Matter. 67 

10. Physical Life Distinct from Matter and Mind. 68 

C. The Sphere of Man 

Man in a Class by Himself. Has He a Never-Dying Soul?. 70 

D. Search for the Missing Link 

1. Exhumed Skulls and Evolution. 71 

2. Description of the Restorations. 72 

3. Beginning of Man according to Evdlution. 74 

4. Chronological Sequence of Fossil Men. 75 

5. Restorations in the New York Museum. . 77 

(a) The Cro-Magnon Man. 78 

(b) The Neanderthal Man . 79 



































Table of Contents xiii 


(c) The Heidelberg Man . 80 

( d ) The Piltdown Man . 81 

( e ) The Java or Trinil Man. 82 

6. Few Traces of Man’s Early History. 83 

7. No Fossil Ape-men in America. 84 

8. Colossal Fakes anent Skulls. 85 

9. The Andrews Water-haul in Thibet. 86 

E. The Question of the Soul 

1. What is the Soul?. 88 

2. Man a Living Soul. 88 

3. Actualism, or the Soul Merely a Series of Experiences. 89 

4. Arguments of Actualists . 89 

5. Substantialism, or Spiritualism . 90 

6. Actualism in Modern Times. 90 

7. Professor William James and the Soul. 91 

8. Substantialism in Modern Times. 92 

9. Responsibility and Immortality . 93 

10. The Seat of the Soul. 94 

11. Soul Survival according to Thompson. 95 

12. Scientists Evade the Question of the Soul. 95 

CHAPTER V 

Is the Doctrine of Evolution a Satisfactory and Comprehensive 
World-View ?—Continued 

1. The Two World-Views. 98 

(<*) The Mechanistic or Naturalistic World-View. 99 

(b) The Theistic World-View . 100 

(c) Preservation and Providence in Relation to Evolution... 101 

2. Theistic Evolution . 102 

( a ) Miracle of Origin of Motion. 104 

(£) Divine Intervention of Theistic Evolution. 104 

3. The Problem of Freedom of the Will. 105 

(a) No Free Will, according to Science.. 106 

(b) The True View of the Will. 107 

4. Summary of Results. 108 

(a) The Millions of Years of Geology. 108 

(b) Gaps in the Geological Eras. 109 

(c) In What Sense Evolution is True. 110 

(d) Scientists Not Trained in Philosophy and Humanism. ... 110 

(e) Current Evolutionism Materialistic . HI 

(/) The Whole Battle of Evolution to be Fought Over Again. Ill 





































xiv Evolution in a Nutshell 


W 

(g ) No Aim or Goal in Evolutionism. 112 

( h ) Evolution and Man . 113 

(*) The Argument from Comparative Anatomy.., r. . 114 

(/) The Argument from Skulls and Bones. 114 

(k) Self-Consciousness and Personality the Dividing Line 

between Animal and Man. 115 

(/) Man in a Class by Himself. 116 









Evolution in a Nutshell 

CHAPTER I 

The Theory of Evolution 
1. The Term Evolution Defined 

T HE term evolution means, etymologically, unrolling or un¬ 
folding. It has, however, come to be used in various, and 
sometimes not altogether legitimate, senses. Men speak of the 
evolution of history, of literature and of a dramatic plot; of the 
evolution of civilization, of a nation and of a religion; and in 
the same breath, of the evolution of the automobile, of a lady’s 
bonnet and of the oak from the acorn. It is obvious that such 
loose use of language is confusing and misleading. In contem¬ 
poraneous usage, the word cannot, unfortunately, be limited to 
its original meaning as given by Webster, namely, “the history 
of the steps by which any living organism has acquired the 
morphological and physiological characters which distinguish it.” 

2. Evolution as Grozvth or Development from a Germinal 
to a Mature State 

The word evolution is constantly, but inaccurately, employed 
to denote change, progress and improvement, as in the arts and 
machinery. To designate as evolution both the improvements 
in the printing-press from Gutenberg to the latest Hoe pattern 
and the growth of a grain of wheat to the mature stalk is an 
outrageous abuse of language, for the two processes are entirely 
distinct. 

In former times, when people used language with more dis¬ 
crimination than today, the word evolution denoted descent or 
derivation, as offspring from parent. Thus James Ward, a 

15 


16 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


famous British author, writes: “By evolution or development 
was meant originally the gradual unfolding of a living germ 
from its embryonic beginning to its final and mature form. . . . 
Evolution, in short, implied ideal ends; in a word, was teleo¬ 
logical . In this sense mechanical evolution or development be¬ 
comes a contradiction in terms, because science now regards the 
universe as a closed system controlled by natural law and ad¬ 
mitting of no intervention, even by the Almighty.” (Naturalism 
and, Agnosticism.) 

The Duke of Argyll writes: “Development is nowhere 
more conspicuous than in human invention: the gun, the watch, 
the steam-engine, etc. But this kind and conception of develop¬ 
ment has nothing whatever to do with the purely physical con¬ 
ception involved in the Darwinian theory.” (Organic Evolution 
Cross-Examined , p. 75.) 

If scientists meant no more by evolution than growth, de¬ 
velopment from the lower to the higher in the history of the 
universe and of man, there would be little, if any, controversy. 
But the word has quietly and surreptitiously been twisted from 
its original to an entirely different, illegitimate and revolutionary 
connotation, as we proceed to show. 

3. Evolution as Denoting Continuity, Uniformity and an 
Entirely Intrinsic and Naturalistic Process 

As we now understand in scientific circles, the term evolution 
denotes a power, force or energy pervading the whole universe, 
physical, psychical, moral, spiritual and religious, from the life¬ 
less atom and electron on up through plant and animal life until 
the climax is reached in man. The keynote, the underlying idea, 
is continuity, intrinsic, eternal, absolute continuity from first to 
last, if indeed there be a first and last. “Continuity,” says Sir 
Oliver Lodge, “is the backbone of evolution.” According to 


1 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


17 


the doctrine of continuity all takes place through the absolute 
supremacy of natural law, whether such laws (as in quasi-theistic 
systems) were ordained by God or are in their nature eternal 
(as in pantheistic, materialistic and atheistic systems). 

That such is the real meaning of the doctrine of evolution 
as usually taught in high schools and colleges is established by 
the writings of Huxley, Haeckel, Cope, Crampton, Conklin, 
Osborn, Coulter, Leuba, Burroughs and scientists generally, as 
well as by nine-tenths of recent books on evolution. Professor 
Huxley writes: “The hypothesis of evolution supposes [a sup¬ 
position, not proof] that in all this vast progression there would 
be no breach of continuity, no point at which we could say, 
‘This is a natural process’ and ‘This is not a natural process.’ ” 
Professor E. D. Cope writes: “The doctrine of evolution may 
be defined as the teaching which holds that creation has been 
and is accomplished by the agency of energies which are intrinsic 
in the evolving matter, and without the interference of agencies 
which are foreign to it. . . . The science of evolution is the 
science of creation .” Here it is categorically affirmed that 
evolution and creation are convertible terms—a shocking abuse of 
language. 

Le Conte, a cosmic theist, gave, possibly, the most concise 
and comprehensive definition: “Evolution is (1) continuous 
progressive change, (2) according to certain laws, (3) by means 
of resident forces. . . . The process (4) pervades the whole 
universe, and the doctrine covers alike every department of 
human thought.” The conception of “certain laws,” “resident 
forces,” “pervading the whole .universe,” together with the idea 
of eternal continuity, excludes the idea of a Creator prior to 
and above the cosmic Drocess. 



18 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


4. Evolution as an Intrinsic Transition from the Homogeneous 
to the Heterogeneous 

Herbert Spencer’s famous definition, adopted from von Baer, 
runs thus: “Evolution is an integration of matter and con¬ 
comitant dissipation of motion; during which matter passes from 
an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity; 
and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel trans¬ 
formation.” The only point that merits notice here is the idea 
that evolution is an intrinsic or natural change from the homo¬ 
geneous to the heterogeneous. As seen above, there is a true 
evolution, as of the flower from the root. Thus, a vegetable 
seed develops or evolves into a stalk. Root and stalk are still 
homogeneous—that is, of the same kind—and ever remain so. 
According to pseudo or false evolutionism, a homogeneous sub¬ 
stance, as e. g. a pea, transmutes itself into a radish, or con¬ 
versely a radish into a pea, that is, into something of another and 
distinct kind. Under this view the homogeneous mineral by 
intrinsic force converts itself into a heterogeneous vegetable. It 
is needless to add that no such changes or transmutations are on 
record. 

Though Spencer’s definition is rarely mentioned by contem¬ 
poraneous writers on evolution, its has been tacitly accepted by 
scientists; and in truth there is no escape from it, if evolution 
is to be a universal law or principle connecting and explaining 
the worlds of matter, life and mind. A generation ago evolution 
was generally understood to be limited to what is known as 
organic evolution, or as the unfolding or development of created 
life-forms, the Creator, as Charles Darwin phrased it, having 
created some three, or at most four, fundamental kinds. But all 
this is a thing of the past, or as they say in Germany and at 
the University of Chicago, ein uberzvundener Standfunkt , “an 




Evolution in a Nutshell 


19 


obsolete viewpoint.” In the language of a thoroughgoing evo¬ 
lutionist, “Cosmic evolution and organic evolution, the growth 
of suns and stars, of earth and plant, and man, are continuous 
parts of one process, . . . different phases of one continuous, 
all-pervading process of cieation. . . . Evolution, based on per¬ 
manent natural laws. ... A universal creative process back of 
evolution.” (W. Patten, Dartmouth College, in The Grand 
Strategy of Evolution.') Scientists generally hesitate to avow 
boldly the underlying principles of their philosophy, but ex- 
President Eliot of Harvard comes out with an unqualified ener¬ 
getic monism: “The scientific doctrine of one omnipresent, 
eternal Energy is fundamentally and completely inconsistent 
with the dualistic conception which sets spirit over against matter, 
good over against evil, man’s wickedness against God’s righteous¬ 
ness, and Satan against Christ.” (Religion of the Future , p. 18.) 
Not even the arch-pantheist Spinoza obliterated the distinction 
between matter and mind, right and wrong. 

5. The Current Theory of Evolution an Old Naturalism 

Whatever the word evolution meant formerly, it has under¬ 
gone a radical change in current thought. Scientifically it de¬ 
notes that everything in the universe, force, life, mind, has 
arisen according to natural law and through intrinsic forces from 
eternity. Some so-called theistic evolutionists allow that God 
created the physical universe with its natural laws, but ever after¬ 
ward withdrew from all control over such laws; but this is the old 
deism, and in fact the most stupid of all views, for it implies 
that God created the universe and then left it to its fate for 
weal or woe. This, too, being an obsolete viewpoint, the evo¬ 
lutionist is in an awkward dilemma. If he allows that God 
created matter and force, atoms, electrons, ions, etc., he is logi¬ 
cally driven to allow that He may have created plant and animal 



20 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


life and man. But such admission would overthrow his assump¬ 
tion of the continuity and invariability of natural law, and so, 
driven to the wall, he is tempted to question whether God 
created anything at all. He usually retains the word God , but 
his God is either the Absolute of philosophy, or the God of 
deism, or the “finite God” of H. G. Wells and the pluralists, 
a God powerless to control the complex affairs of the Cosmos. 

6. The Newtonian and the Laflacean Viewpoints 

In the pre-Darwinian and early post-Darwinian periods the 
word evolution was still understood quite generally, though not 
without exception, in a theistic sense. Sir Isaac Newton at the 
close of the Princifia declares that “the whole diversity of 
natural things can have arisen from nothing but the ideas and 
the will of one necessarily existing being who is always and 
everywhere, God Supreme, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, 
absolutely perfect.” A century later, when Laplace submitted 
his Mecanique Celeste to Napoleon, the latter inquired why the 
word God did not once occur in the treatise. Laplace replied 
haughtily: “Sire, there is no need of him,” implying that there 
was no God back of the nebulous mass assumed by Laplace. 

The fundamental difference between the science of Newton’s 
day and ours is the difference between the Newtonian and the 
Laplacean viewpoints, the one theistic and supernaturalistic, the 
other naturalistic, untheistic and practically atheistic. As says 
James Ward, “We have to note the existence in our time of a 
vast circle of empirical knowledge in the whole range of which 
the idea of a Necessary Being or a First Cause has no place.” 
(Naturalism and Agnosticism.) 

7. The True Inwardness of the Current Theory of Evolution 

That the above description of the real inner nature of the 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


21 


current theory of evolution is in accord with facts we prove 
by citations from authorities. According to the Standard Dic¬ 
tionary, “Evolution is the cosmological theory that accounts for 
the universe and its contents by the combination [not divine 
creation] of separate and diffused atoms existing originally in 
a condition of absolute homogeneity.” This is simply the 
Spencerian idea of homogeneity passing into heterogeneity. The 
British psychologist James Sully, co-author of the article “Evo¬ 
lution” in the Encyclopedia Britannica, writes: “It is clear that 
the doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of 
creation. Just as the biological doctrine of the transmutation of 
species is opposed to that of special creation, so the idea of 
evolution as applied to the formation of the world as a whole is 
opposed to that of a direct creative volition.” 

Similarly the Century Dictionary: “Evolution, the doctrine 
of the derivation of all existing species, genera, orders, classes, 
etc., of animals and plants, from a few simple forms of life, 
if not from one; evolutionism. In this sense, evolution is op¬ 
posed to creationism , or the view that all living things have 
been created at some time substantially as they now exist.” If 
need be, many other authorities can be cited to the same effect. 



CHAPTER II 


The Theory of Creation 

I N marked contrast with the foregoing is the Biblical creation 
theory recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis. What¬ 
ever may be said of the critical view that the two chapters are 
by different authors and of different dates, they present funda¬ 
mentally the same idea, that the physical universe, plants, animals 
and man were created in time by the Supreme Being. As 
Chapter I is the backbone of the creation narrative a brief out¬ 
line is necessary, 

1. Three Pivotal Points 

According to Scripture, and sound philology and philosophy, 
creation is the calling into being of that which previously was 
not. It is not an accident that the Hebrew word bara (created), 
found in Genesis 1:1, 21 and 27, and there only, denotes the 
primordial creation of the three distinct realms of matter—force, 
life and man. There is, first, the realm of matter-force (we 
employ this hyphenated expression because science is not certain 
whether matter exists in itself or is merely phenomenal). Matter 
as such can do nothing; it is dead. It is the force resident in 
matter that is active. But such force never becomes life. There 
is, second, the realm of life. The ancients called it the soul 
of the world (anima mundi). What life is science does not 
know and cannot produce. According to Scripture it is a divine 
creation. 

The third realm is that of spirit, of which God is the head 
and under which man comes. Biblically the difference between 
man and the animal is greater than between the plant and the 
animal. The reason is obvious. The latter has merely the 

22 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


23 


life-principle, whereas man has in addition the spirit-principle 
and entity. These three realms are absolutely distinct. Hence, 
says Guyot: “According to this [the use of the word created] 
the evolution from one of these orders into the other—from 
matter into life, the animal life into the spiritual life of man— 
is impossible.” 

2. The Creative Days in Outline 

The first chapter of Genesis falls naturally into the follow¬ 
ing divisions and sub-divisions: 

1. The Inorganic Era 

First day—Light cosmical. 

Second day—The earth divided from the fluid around it, or 
individualized. 

Third day—1. Outlining of the land and water. 2. Creation of 
vegetation. 

2. The Organic Era 

Fourth day—Light from the sun. 

Fifth day—Creation of the lower order of animals. 

Sixth day—1. Creation of mammals. 2. Creation of man. 

That a marked parallelism exists between this outline and 
the teachings of science has often been pointed out, but studious¬ 
ly ignored in current thought. Prof. J. D. Dana, of Yale, 
states the case thus: “The cosmogony of modern science teaches 
that the universe was first in a chaotic or gaseous state. The 
process of its development included the following steps: 1. Ac¬ 
tivity begun—light an immediate result. 2. The earth made 
an independent sphere. 3. Outlining the land and water, de¬ 
termining the earth’s general configuration. 4. The idea of 
life in the lower plants, and afterwards, if not contemporaneous¬ 
ly, in the lowest or systemless animals, or Protozoans. 5. The 
energizing light of the sun shining on the earth an essential 
preliminary to the display of the systems of life. 6. Intro¬ 
duction of mammals—the highest order of the vertebrates, 



24 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


the class afterwards to be dignified by including a being of 
moral and intellectual nature. 7. Introduction of man.” 
{Manual of Geology, p. 743.) 

Elsewhere Dana writes: “The first thought that strikes the 
scientific reader is the evidence of divinity, not merely in the 
first verse of the record and the successive fiats, but in the whole 
order of creation. There is so much that the most recent read¬ 
ings of science have for the first time explained, that the idea 
of man as the author becomes utterly incomprehensible. By 
proving the record true, science pronounces it divine; for who 
could have correctly narrated the secrets of eternity but God 
himself?” 

3. Fiat Creation 

One hears much these days in derision of fiat or special 
creation. The word fiat , as every school-boy ought to know, 
occurs in the Latin translation of verse 3, dixitque Deus fiat lux , 
and means the divine command, expressed, not audibly, but 
volitionally and executively. It is an accommodation to human 
modes of expression. When President Coolidge, on February 3, 
1924, issued a proclamation directing that, in testimony of 
respect to the memory of Woodrow Wilson, flags be displayed 
at half-staff, he issued a “fiat.” What else but “special” and a 
“fiat” could creation in the Biblical sense be? 

4. The Creation of Man 

Two verses of special interest to mankind are Gen. 1:27, 
“God created man in his own images in the image of God 
created he him; male and female created he them,” and 2:7, 
“Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground and 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a 
living soul.” The narrative, instead of saying, “let there be 
man,” “let the earth produce man,” represents God as in a 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


25 


contemplative pause, evidently to indicate the superior worth 
and dignity of the creature about to be formed. “Earth and 
earth’s tribes were prepared; but now there is a king to be set 
over them—one like them, but also unlike them; a complex 
being, made up of the dust of the earth and of the image of 
God.” (Alford.) 

As great confusion of thought prevails regarding the real 
nature of man contrasted with the highest animals, we quote 
at length from S. R. Driver, a great Old Testament critic: “The 
image is (1) something which evidently forms the ground and 
basis of his entire pre-eminence over animals; (2) it is some¬ 
thing which is transmitted to his descendants (5:1, 3; 9:6) and 
belongs therefore to man in general, and not to man in a state 
of primitive innocence; (3) it relates, from the nature of the 
case, to man’s immaterial nature. It can be nothing but the gift 
of self-conscious reason , which is possessed by man, but by no 
other animal. In all that is implied by this—in the various 
intellectual faculties possessed by him; in his creative and 
originative power, enabling him to develop and make progress 
in arts, in sciences and in civilization generally, which no animal 
has ever been able to do, . . . in the capacity for knowing 
God and holding spiritual communion with Him—man is dis¬ 
tinguished fundamentally from other animals and is allied to 
the divine nature.” ( Genesis , p. 15.) When one recalls that 
Driver wrote this during the full sway of the Darwinian hypo¬ 
thesis, it is significant. 

5. Length of the Creative Days 

The question of the length of the creative days has always 
perplexed Bible students. How may the flat contradiction be¬ 
tween the Usher date of 4004 B. C. for the creation of the 
world be reconciled with the millions of years demanded by 
geology and astronomy? Let certain facts be noted. Already in 



26 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


the early Church it was noticed that the Hebrew yom> day, has 
four meanings within the limits of the first two chapters. 1. 
In 1:3-5 it means the whole period of evening and morning. 
2. Then in verses 14-19 yom means day in the sense of measure¬ 
ment of duration. 3. Again in verse 5 there are two meanings 
of the word. 4. Finally in 2:4 it means the whole creative 
period. Hence yom may mean a day of twenty-four hours, or 
a period of undefined length, the day of Jehovah, with whom 
a thousand years are as one day. 

The intelligent Bible student knows that the dates in the 
margin of the Authorized Version of the Old Testament are 
not a part of the text, that is, are not “inspired,” but the 
calculations of scholars and subject to revision. Even before 
the rise of modern science Old Testament scholars concluded 
that the Usher date of 4004 B. C. must be abandoned. Dr. 
W. H. Green, of Princeton Theological Seminary, in an article 
in the Bibliotheca Sacra , April, 1890, showed that the chronology 
of the first eleven chapters of Genesis is not fixed absolutely and 
admits a wide margin of interpretation. The view, therefore, 
that would seem to meet the essential conditions of the case is 
to regard the days of the first chapter as age-long periods, or 
God-divided days, in distinction from sun-divided days, as said 
Augustine centuries before the advent of modern geology, 

6. Creation ex Nihilo 

A word must be added on another greatly misunderstood sub¬ 
ject, namely, creation ex nihilo , or “creation from nothing.” 
Ex nihilo means that the creation of an object is not due to 
a development of any existing thing. The decisive language 
of Heb. 11:3, “by faith we understand that the worlds were 
framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen 
were not made of things which appear,” proves that things seen 
are not made of things that appear, and this is verified by the very 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


27 


latest philosophy. The Greeks said: “From nothing, nothing 
comes.” Hence, as polytheists, they concluded that the universe 
is eternal, which was a correct inference from their premises. 
Christian thought accepts the Greek apothegm, but in the sense 
that the Infinite Spirit out of nothing outside of himself created 
the universe. 

It ought to be remembered that the doctrine of creation as 
contained in the first two chapters of Genesis runs through the 
whole Bible. See Prov. 8:22; Neh. 9:6; all of Psalm 104; 
Acts 17:24; Rom. 11:36; I Cor. 8:6. 

7. The Biblical and the Babylonian Cosmogonies 

The opinion is widely current that the early chapters of 
Genesis are derived from Babylonian sources and that the first 
chapter especially is based upon a Babylonian epic of the 
Creation.*" There are various fragments of so-called Babylonian 
creation poems, but the only one that merits notice was written, 
or at least revised, in the time of Ashurbanipal, in the seventh 
century B. C. It contained originally about 900 lines, of which, 
however, some 200 are lost. Most of the language is placed in 
the mouth of Marduk, the later supreme god of the Babylonians. 
As a matter of fact only a passage here and there can by the 
utmost stretch of the imagination be brought into comparison 
with the originality and sublimity of the Genesis narrative. We 
reproduce from the first tablet a few characteristic lines alleged 
to be the source of the Biblical account: 

When above the heaven was not named, 

And beneath the earth bore no name, 

And the primeval Apsu, who begat them, 

And Mummu and Tiamat, the mother of them all, 

Their waters were mingled together, 

And no field was formed, no marsh seen, 

When no one of the gods had been called into being, 



28 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


And none bore a name, and no destinies were fixed, 

Then were created the gods in the midst of (heaven), 

Lakhmu and Lakhamu were called into being. 

The reader will see that these lines are vague and insipid 
and do not approach even remotely the clearness and grandeur 
of Genesis. It will be noticed that even the gods themselves 
are represented as having been created. In the other tablets, 
water, heaven, earth, gods, Marduk, the abyss, animals, man, 
plants, minerals appear in no logical or natural order. All is 
disorder and confusion. The only possible parallel is in the con¬ 
flict between Marduk (light) and Tiamat (darkness) and the 
division of the abyss into upper and lower waters. 

It is difficult to see upon what evidence the Hebrew account 
can be regarded as derived from the Babylonian. The former 
is distinctly and characteristically theistic, homogeneous, sys¬ 
tematic, advances from the lower to the higher in scientific 
order and implies the personality and sovereignty of God. The 
latter is grossly polytheistic, or rather naturalistic, for all is the 
result of blind force, the gods themselves being the offspring of 
nature. Toward the close of the poem the god Ea is swept 
away and “an atheistic philosophy has taken its place.” (Sayce.) 
The view of some Assyriologists is that both accounts go back to 
an original source. According to Sayce, the Babylonian account 
“is probably not much older than the age of the second Assyrian 
empire.” Much can be said in support of the view that the 
Biblical cosmogony goes back to a primitive, monotheistic, Acca- 
dian-Babylonian source, which in a more or less pure form was 
handed down to Abraham and his posterity and ultimately used 
in the composition of the Biblical narrative. 



CHAPTER III 

Chief Lines of Proof of Evolution 

T) ROOFS of evolution are derived from many fields and 
departments of science, but chiefly from geology, com¬ 
parative anatomy, embryology and genetics. We review these 
briefly. 

A. Geology 

As the result of years of investigation into the nature and 
constitution of the earth, scientists have classified the data under 
the heads of eras and periods, as Azoic, Proterozoic, Paleozoic, 
Mesozoic, Cenozoic, Pleistocene and Quaternary. Our classi¬ 
fication is based upon that of Chamberlin and Salisbury’s College 
Geology and of Grabau. Though we use the term geology, the 
evidence for evolution is in reality not so much from geology, 
the science of the rocks, as from paleontology, the science deal¬ 
ing with fossils of plants and animals excavated from the 
terrestrial strata. It has a certain advantage for our purpose, 
since the remains, though very fragmentary, are usually parts 
of the solid portions of organisms actually existing in former 
times. And yet we must not expect too much, for it is difficult 
to prove in all cases that the supposed stratum of a fossil is 
the real one. Charles Darwin himself admitted “the imper¬ 
fection of the geological record,” and regarded it as “a history 
of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect.” 

As there was no life in the Azoic era and very little in the 
Proterozoic, we begin with the Paleozoic and its subdivisions 
into periods. 

7. The Paleozoic Era 

The reader must exercise patience in our use of certain long 
and unusual words; otherwise it will be impossible to get the 
drift of the argument. Let it be stated once for all that, since 

29 


30 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


the corner-stone of the doctrine of evolution is continuity , 
geology must indicate a constant advance and progression, geneti¬ 
cally, from the lowest to the highest forms of life. If breaks 
should occur, or the succession appear to be an emergence of 
types and forms not the lineal descendants of the immediately 
preceding organisms, the assumed law of continuity would be 
invalidated and the Biblical representation of a direct creation 
upheld. How does the case stand in the Paleozoic era? 

According to evolutionary postulates only the lower organ¬ 
isms should appear in this early era. But already in the Cam¬ 
brian, the first period, “every great division of the animal king¬ 
dom, except the vertebrate, had its representative.” (Cham, 
and Salisb., p. 495.) In the next period, the Silurian, complex 
organisms are found, one of the most notable being trilobites 
with well-developed eyes, which confirms the Biblical repre¬ 
sentation that eyes were made for seeing, rather than the evo¬ 
lutionistic dogma that, seeing being required, eyes arose spon¬ 
taneously. The great gulf between the radiates, mollusks and 
invertebrates existed in the Silurian. A strange fact is that 
species ruthlessly appeared and disappeared, apparently without 
ancestors or descendants. This militates against the law of 
continuity. Recognizing this dilemma, Grabau states the issue 
between Christian theism and science: “Only two explanations 
seem possible. Either these forms were created at the beginning 
of the Cambrian time and thereafter continued to evolve and 
become differentiated ... or the base of the Cambrian does 
not present the earliest record of life”—implying, that is, special 
creation of organic types. ( Geology , II, p. 536.) 

In the Carboniferous period immense forests exuded sap 
(petroleum) ; there were mollusks and fish, but few air-breathing 
animals. Of some ten thousand species of animals at the be¬ 
ginning of the Carboniferous, there were only some 300 at the 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


31 


close. In fact there was a great gap between this era and the 
following. In short, one may ask, Where is the evolution? 

2. Mesozoic Era 

In the first or Triassic period of this era varieties of fish 
and birds of gigantic size and in great number (now extinct) 
appeared. “There was a great break in the succession of land 
life, so far as the record shows. What became of the Permian 
vertebrate faunas of North America is unknown.” (Chamb. 
and Salis.) “In view of the mammalian dominance in later 
times, it is noteworthy that the non-placentals developed but 
slowly and feebly during the Mesozoic era.” Again, we are 
told by the University of Chicago geologists: “The marvelous 
development of aquatic and terrestrial reptiles and birds makes 
the scanty record of the mammals all the more singular.” We 
ask, where is the evolution? 

Then came the Cretaceous or chalk-formation period, in 
which trees like the beech and oak, aquatic reptiles, dinosaurs 
and terrestrial birds flourished. The marsupial mammals of the 
Jurassic period and the placentals of the Eocene seem to have 
disappeared. “The most remarkable departure from the pre¬ 
ceding ages is the prominent place which the rhizopods or 
foraminifers (invertebrates) take in the record. They made 
large contributions to the chalk of the period.” One wonders 
how the highly organized placental mammals of the Eocene 
period were evolved from the invertebrate rhizopods. 

3. The Cenozoic or Tertiary Era 

In the Cenozoic era we find marked peculiarities in the new 
species in place of the Cretaceans, the disappearance of great 
saurians and the rise of placental mammals. With reference 
to the first period of this era Chamberlin and Salisbury say: 
“No traces of apes have been found in the Eocene, but repre¬ 
sentatives of the lower primates, the lemuroids, appeared in the 



32 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


Wasatch epoch in America, and in a similar horizon in Europe.” 

Then in the Miocene period reptiles, cat and dog families 
abounded. Among primates are apes, monkeys, lemurs, chimpan¬ 
zees and gorillas, but “the record throws no light on the origin 
of the Hominidae.” Here, again, a troublesome situation arises. 
The statements of Chamberlin and Salisbury and of Grabau and 
geologists generally concerning the slow development of the 
placentals in the Triassic period, the scanty record of marsupials 
in the Jurassic, the unimportant part played by the placental 
mammals in the Cretaceous, their sudden appearance in the 
Eocene and the precedence of ungulates in the Miocene seem 
inexplicable on evolutionistic principles of continuity. 

A similar observation applies to the Pliocene period, in 
which there were sloths, ant-eaters, armadillos and remarkable 
South American monkeys, but no near approach to the human 
species. 

4. The Pleistocene or Glacial Era 
This era has peculiar value and significance, as it is the one 
which immediately precedes the advent of man. The distin¬ 
guishing feature is the extensive glaciation, or ice-sheets, covering 
some six or eight million square miles of the earths surface 
where previously mild climates had prevailed. Proof of the 
ice-formations is found in the drift, the surface of the rock 
underlying it and the relation of the drift to its bed. The 
drift ranges in depth from several feet to five hundred. The 
causes and duration of the glaciation are subjects of dispute 
among specialists. 

5. Life in the Pleistocene Age 
That which concerns us especially is the extent to which 
plant and animal life was affected during this era. Chamberlin 
and Salisbury hold that the glaciation “destroyed much life and 
caused great change in that which survived,” and, though “more 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


33 


than half the known species of marine Pliocene invertebrates 
are still living, . . . the land vertebrates were very generally 
replaced by new species”—that is, the old had died out, but 
whence the new species came is not definitely known. Some 
scientists suggest extensive “migration;” others hold that the 
glacial epoch enabled animals to escape and become the pro¬ 
genitors of later forms, but there is no general agreement as to 
the chief reason. 

Nor are- scientists agreed whether man existed in the Pleis¬ 
tocene era. Grabau unhesitatingly affirms the presence of man 
not only in the late, but also in the early Pleistocene. Others 
deny this and, in fact, throw doubt on the whole scientific 
method in seeking to determine man’s antiquity. Professor A. 
G. Tansley, in the presidential address before the Biological 
Section of the British Association in 1923, points out the weak¬ 
ness of the fossil argument and regards the search for common 
ancestors among the plants as “literally a hopeless quest, the 
genealogical tree an illusory vision.” ( Nature , March 8, 1924.) 
In the same issue of Nature Professor F. O. Bower of Glasgow 
University writes: “At the present moment we seem to have 
reached a phase of negation in respect of the achievements of 
phyletic morphology, and in conclusions as to descent.” 

In Nature , April 26, 1924, Professor A. C. Seward, Cam¬ 
bridge University, writes: “The present tendency is to discard 
the old-fashioned genealogical tree, with its wonderful diversity 
of branches, because a student who takes an impartial retrospect 
soon discovers that the fossil raises more problems than it solves.” 

B. Comparative Anatomy 

Every one has noticed certain remarkable resemblances be¬ 
tween animals. The same general plan is seen in the forefoot 
of the rat, the opossum, the horse and the elephant; but it does 
not follow that these are the same or have the same origin. 



34 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


The fact that scientists constantly argue that, because anatomical 
resemblances exist between the ape and man, therefore they 
have the same origin, necessitates an inquiry into the true state 
of the case. 

1. The Argument from Similarity of Structure 

Comparing the ox and the horse, we find that in both the 
foreleg is exclusively locomotive in function. There are other 
points of resemblance, but there were slightly different modes 
of converting the primitive five-toed and mobile anterior limb 
into forms purely locomotive. Professor W. B. Scott writes: 
“The same elements are present in the human hand and arm as 
in the foreleg of the horse and ox, but in each case character¬ 
istically modified to serve different ends. Man’s hand is really 
a very primitive and undifferentiated structure and can be put 
to a great many different uses. Had it been highly specialized 
for a single purpose, human progress and civilization would have 
been impossible, for these have always depended upon co¬ 
ordination of hand, eye and brain.” Here, with some degree 
of similarity, we see widely different structure and function and 
little that indicates identity of origin. 

Scott shows in the case of the Crustacea that “there is a 
great variety in the number of segments which are united to 
form the head and trunk, as well as in the form and function 
of the appendages. The comparison immediately suggests the 
derivation of all the Crustacea from ancestors in which all the 
segments, except the head, were similar and were provided with 
appendages which were similar throughout. As this group or 
that advanced in differentiation certain appendages became spe¬ 
cialized for the better performance of particular operations.” 
Examples of a similar character might be adduced from all the 
great divisions of the animal kingdom. Under this view Scott 
allows that the belief in a creative plan is not excluded. It 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


35 


would follow that the general plan of the Creative Days out¬ 
lined in -our Chapter II is scientifically substantiated or at least 
not disproved. 

This latter conclusion is borne out by Scott’s additional 
comments: “Another and perhaps weightier objection to the 
theory of genetic connection is that comparative anatomy gives 
us no means of connecting animals of fundamentally different 
types or plans of structure. It is impossible to derive a fish from 
a lobster, or a starfish from an oyster, and thus the different 
structural types would seem to be separated by impossible barriers. 
Evolution within the type might be admitted, without con¬ 
ceding the possibility of deriving one type from another.” 
(Theory of Evolution , p. 54.) 

This idea of “separation of impossible barriers” and “evolu¬ 
tion within the type” is virtually a return to the original and 
legitimate meaning of the term. (See above, page 2.) 

2. Physical Differences between Man and Higher Animals 

Contrary to the popular idea, zealously and constantly 
paraded by scientists, the similarities between man and higher 
animals are not at all typical or fundamental. Thus, the quad- 
rumana go on all fours horizontally, or in a more or less 
stooping posture, while man walks upright. By no process of 
development could the ape or gorilla change the structure of 
their frame to the upright attitude of man. “Acquiring an 
upright position could not have been useful to man in his 
assumed low condition as he emerged from the animal, and 
consequently such a change cannot be explained by natural 
selection,” or any evolutionary process. Alfred R. Wallace, the 
famous British scientist, declared that the difference between 
man and animals is unaccountable through natural selection: 
“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is 
that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man.” 



36 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


Wallace cites as an objection to the evolution of man from the 
ape the absence of a covering of hair from man’s body, for if 
evolved it must have been from animals that had a hairy cover¬ 
ing, and the loss of hair would be of no use to man in the 
primitive state. 

Professor Virchow writes: “There exists a definite barrier 
separating man from the animal which has not yet been effaced— 
heredity, which transmits to children the faculties of parents. 
We have never seen a monkey bring a man into the world nor 
a man produce a monkey. This fact has been abundantly veri¬ 
fied through the Mendel-Weismann law of the non-transmission 
of acquired characters. All men having a simian appearance 
are simply pathological variants.” 

3. Anatomical Differences between Man and the Ape 

It is asserted on all sides that anatomical structure shows 
that man and ape are of the same order. Huxley, however, 
writes: “I find that those who endeavor to teach what nature 
so clearly shows in this matter are liable to have their opinions 
misrepresented and their phraseology garbled until they seem 
to say that the structural differences between man and even the 
highest apes are small and insignificant. Let me take this op¬ 
portunity, then, of distinctly asserting, on the contrary, that 
they are great and significant; that every bone of a gorilla bears 
marks by which it might be distinguished from the correspond¬ 
ing bone of a man; and that in the present creation, at any 
rate, no intermediate link bridges over the gap between Homo 
and Troglodytes.” (Cyclopedia of Science .) 

In another work, “ Evidences of Man’s Place in Nature ,” 
Huxley enters into minute details on the anatomical differences 
between man and apes. Holding that the animal which most 
nearly approaches man is either the chimpanzee or the gorilla, 
he selects the latter for comparison: “In the general propor- 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


37 


tions of the body and limbs there is a remarkable difference be¬ 
tween the gorilla and man, which at once strikes the eye. The 
gorilla’s brain-case is smaller, its trunk larger, its lower limbs 
shorter, its upper limbs longer in proportion than those of man.” 
Huxley shows that the same difference exists in the case of the 
arms, legs, hands, neck, pelvis, ribs and vertebral column. 

More recent authorities support Huxley’s position. Professor 
Otto Hamann, in his great book, “Die Abstammung des Men - 
schen ” (The Descent of Man), writes: “The more or less up¬ 
right position of the body of the anthropoid apes depends me¬ 
chanically upon causes fundamentally different from those which 
apply in the human body. . . . The upright walk of the ape 
depends for the most part upon muscular work. In the human 
body on the contrary the connection of the head with the spinal 
column is where the spinal marrow enters from the skull through 
the aperture at the back of the head into the spinal column.” 

Baumueller, as quoted by Hamann, points out “that man 
goes upon his feet without the use of his arms for support or 
balance; that body, thigh and lower part of the leg lie as it were 
in a line, and that the axis of length takes a vertical position 
to the level ground. The ape, on the other hand, even the 
gibbon, cannot stand upright like man. Even when he raises 
himself, the thigh and leg never stand in a line, but the thigh 
forms with the body and the lower part of the leg, and the 

latter again with the level ground, a greater or smaller angle. 

. . . Were the ape to stretch his leg like a man neither safe 
walking nor standing would be possible to him. . . . On that 

account no ape can even temporarily walk upright, that is, 

like a man.” 

In short, so far as the argument for man’s descent from the 
ape family turns on anatomical similarity, the conclusion must 
be: “Not proved.” 



38 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


C. Embryology 

Embryology is the study of the organism from its beginning 
in the cell or egg to its maturity in the adult. It is usually 
divided into two parts: ontogeny, the development of the in¬ 
dividual; phylogeny, or the development of the race. In the 
out-and-out theory of evolution, the development of the in¬ 
dividual is but the development of the basic characteristics of 
the race or species. It passes under the name of the “recapitu¬ 
lation theory,” the individual being regarded as merely a re¬ 
capitulation of the race. Haeckel regarded it as the fundamental 
biological law, but scientists today are still warring over the 
fundamental facts. 

1. Conflicting Evidence 

Only several weeks are required for a speck of protoplasm 
in a hen’s egg to develop into a chick capable of taking care of 
itself. But according to evolutionists millions of years are re¬ 
quired for the development of amphibians into birds. Some 
animals pass from a larval into a higher state, as the tadpole into 
the frog and the caterpillar into the butterfly. Here the de¬ 
velopment of the species has no bearing on the development 
of the individual. 

Accordingly, says C. Gegenbauer, “ontogeny becomes a field 
in which an active imagination has full scope for its dangerous 
play, but in which positive results are by no means everywhere 
to be obtained.” Professor E. B. Wilson, an authority on the 
cell, writes: “It must be evident to any candid observer, not 
only that the embryological method is open to criticism, but 
that the whole fabric of morphology, so far as it rests upon 
embryological evidence, stands in urgent need of reconstruction.” 

2. The Theory of Germinal Variation 

A generation ago the German scientist A. Weismann turned 
the investigation into a new channel by the claim that variations 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


39 


are germinal, that is, that they first appear in the egg and the 
sperm and cause modifications in the individual. According to 
Professor T. H. Morgan, “the idea has been fruitful and is 
generally accepted by biologists today. It means that the off¬ 
spring of a pair of animals are not affected by the structure or 
activities of their parents, but the germ plasm is the unmodified 
stream from which both the parents and the young have arisen. 
Hence their resemblance.” ( A Critique of the Theory of 
Evolution .) 

Related to the foregoing is the theory of discontinuous vari¬ 
ation, suggested by Bateson and de Vries. This conception 
militates against the recapitulation theory. “I venture to think 
that these new ideas and this new evidence have played havoc 
with the biogenetic law.” (0/> cit ., p. 19.) Other recent 
authorities, as Professor A. Sidgwick of Cambridge University, 
the Encyclopedia Britannica and Professor V. L. Kellogg, oppose 
the recapitulation view, the latter saying: “The recapitulation 
theory is mostly wrong.” ( Darwinism Today , p. 18.) 

3. The Human Eye 

According to Scripture, God made the eye for seeing; ac¬ 
cording to science, animals, needing eyes, proceeded to make 
them. Charles Darwin spoke of the eye as “a living optical 
instrument as superior to one of glass as the works of the 
Creator are to those of men.” 

Arthur Brisbane sums up the matter thus: “How did blind 
creatures of the earliest life develop eyes and the complicated 
machinery of vision? Evolution, survival of the fittest, struggle 
for existence, adaptation to environment and all other formulae 
do not explain that any more than they could explain an electric 
fan or a kodak.” 

4. Biology and the Cell 

Though it has always been held that the organic and in- 



40 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


organic worlds are marvelously related, it is only within recent 
years that the claim has been made seriously that the latter pro¬ 
duces and in fact is ultimately identical with the former. Such 
a view is baldly mechanistic and materialistic. Food taken into 
the stomach affects the nerves and the mind, but it does not 
follow that the mind is a secretion of the brain. Biology ex¬ 
plains many things, but, dealing largely with dead bodies, it 
can at most touch merely the physical and chemical. We can 
never by dissecting life get at the life itself. The most elabor¬ 
ate analysis of the brain and the most microscopic examination 
of the cell do not explain how we think. Young students of 
biology take only “an elementary course in biology. They 
listen to lectures and dissect a few of the simpler organisms 
under the microscope. They leave the course imbued with the 
idea that the problems of life have been solved or will be solved 
when knowledge has increased. They have been taught to be 
receptive to a philosophy of materialism and they confidently 
spread its doctrines. ,, 

Such is the language of Professor L. T. More, of the 
department of physics in the University of Cincinnati, in the 
Vanuxem lectures at Princeton in January, 1925, and just 
appearing in book form under the title “ The Dogma of Evo¬ 
lution.” It may be stated in passing that the work virtually saps 
the foundation of the whole structure of the current false 
evolutionism, as we shall see. 

Lately much has been written about the cell. Biologists, 
such as Schleiden and Schwann, and the great body of teachers 
in the high schools and colleges regard the cell as the key to 
the situation. But the outcome “would have been quite different 
if biologists had continued to study the organism as a living unit 
instead of transferring the dead organism to the laboratory, there 
to investigate it as if it were a mere aggregate of elementary 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


41 


cells whose living structure and function could be fully de¬ 
termined by first killing the cell with stains and then examining 
its corpus under the microscope. . . . From the point of view 
of this discussion, we can surely point to it [the cell theory] 
as leading directly to the theory of mechanistic evolution. The 
complex living organism becomes but an addition of simple and 
modified cells; and the cell itself, seemingly lifeless or merely 
an adumbration of life, can be assumed to be merely a complex 
form of physical nature.” (More, o'p. cit. y p. 277.) 

Biology has thrown an interesting sidelight on the chemical 
laws of the dead bodies of the living world, but it has con¬ 
tributed little toward the solution of the inner nature of life, 
and that little makes of plants, animals and man mere machines 
governed by physical laws. 

5. The Cell in College and High-School Text-Books 

The description of the cell found in any college text-book 
is fascinating, but misleading. Thus Professor C. W. Hunter, 
whose “Civic Biology” played such an important part in the 
recent Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, writes: “In the daily 
life of a one-celled animal we find the single cell performing 
all the general activities which we shall later find the many- 
celled animal is able to perform. . . . The single cell is in 
fact an organism able to carry on the business of living almost 
as effectually as a very complex animal.” (0/>. cit. y p. 171.) 
From these sweeping assertions it would follow that the “ac¬ 
tivities” of man are ultimately due to “cells.” Let us look at 
this astounding proposition. 

Biologically the cell is a microscopic body consisting of a 
jelly-like mass called protoplasm. Minute granules within the 
cell, say biologists, determine the growth and characteristics of 
the organism; and by means of splitting of cells, their differen¬ 
tiation, the activity of the chromosomes, the growth, trans- 



42 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


formation and various extraordinary processes, the one-celled 
amoeba becomes ultimately the many-celled man. It is a well- 
articulated theory, but is it true? 

The science of biology, we are told, is the science of the 
cell. According to More, the current dogmatism of the cell 
theory was originally propounded by Schleiden in the dictum: 
“In the strictest sense of the word, only the separate cell de¬ 
serves to be called an individual.” Probably most biologists 
would accept this as correct. But, says More: “Could there 
be a more inadequate or futile idea than to suppose an adult 
man is contained in the single cell from which he originates 
or that the multitude of cells of his body has each a separate 
identity? The cell is a relatively simple physical body, com¬ 
posed of a number of chemical elementary substances combined 
together in, to us, a complex fashion. But it has one distin¬ 
guishing feature which, to one who does not believe in a mech¬ 
anistic or naturalistic philosophy, makes it distinct from the 
physical world: It is alive; it contains potentially the power 
of developing into an adult organism which carries on in the 
man the distinguishing characteristics of the ancestral bodies 
of which it was once a part. This governing principle, call it 
spirit, hyperphysical force, biotic force, or what you will, 
governs and regulates the cell’s growth and is so certain in its 
action that the development to an organism similar to its an¬ 
cestor never fails: the cell of the oak tree must become an oak 
tree or nothing.” {Of. cit. y p. 284.) 

6. The Organism More than the Cell 
Signs are not wanting that the more philosophic biologists 
are gradually accepting the view that back of the cell is the 
life-principle determining the nature of the organism. In fact, 
they are coming to doubt that life can be subjected to the 
microscope except in its outward manifestation. Thus, Professor 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


43 


W. Ritter, as quoted by More, writes: “May we not .go further 
and say that an organism is an organism from the egg onward, 
quite independently of the number of cells present? In that 
case, continuity of organization would be the essential thing, 
while division into cell-territories might be a matter of quite 
secondary importance. . . . The more carefully we compare 
the cleavage in different eggs, the more clear it becomes that 
the test of organization in the egg does not lie in its mode of 
cleavage, but in subtile formative processes. The plastic forces 
heed no cell boundaries, but mold the germ-mass regardless of 
the way it is cut up into cells. . . . The essence of organization 
can no more lie in the number of nuclei [of the cells] than 
in the number of cells. The structure which we see in a cell- 
mosaic is something superadded to organization, not itself the 
foundation of organization.” (Op cit. y p. 286.) 

Similarly Professor E. B. Wilson: “The only unity is that 
of the entire organism, and as long as its cells remain in con¬ 
tinuity they are to be regarded, not as morphological individuals, 
but as specialized centers of action into which the living body 
resolves itself, and by means of which the physiological division 
of labor is effected.” (The Unity of Organism , I, p. 161.) 
In the language of More: “If the cell-theory falls, then the 
chief support of the mechanistic philosophy of life and evolution 
is destroyed.” (Op. cit. } p. 289.) 

D. Genetics—Laws of Heredity 

A fourth line of proof of evolution is sought in the study 
of heredity or genetics. Individuals are to a certain extent like 
their parents, and yet marked differences often occur. The 
extent to which peculiarities are transmitted is another problem 
which awaits solution. If acquired qualities could be trans¬ 
mitted, new species might arise. Darwin held that, if acquired 
characteristics are not transmitted, there can be no evolution. 



44 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


1. Are there New Species? 

Before we can decide the question we must know what a 
species is. The best short definition is that of Le Conte: “If 
the two kinds breed freely with each other and the offspring is 
indefinitely fertile, the kinds are called varieties; but if they 
do not they are called species.” The Century Dictionary has 
a clear definition: “The individuals of thoroughly distinct 
species do not interbreed, or, if they are near enough to hybrid¬ 
ize, their progeny is usually infertile, so that the cross is not 
in perpetuity. The horse and the ass offer a good case in point.” 

With this understanding of the term it would seem that 
there are no new species. Professor W. Bateson, the great British 
geneticist, writes: “We read his [Darwin’s] scheme of evo¬ 
lution as we would those of Lucretius or of Lamarck. . . . The 
doctrine of the survival of the fittest ... is mere eighteenth 
century optimism. ... It was a commonplace of evolutionary 
theory that at least the domestic animals have been developed 
from a few wild types. . . . The various races of birds, for 
instance, it was said, all came from the Indian jungle fowl. . . . 
But try to reconstruct the steps in their evolution and you realize 
your hopeless ignorance. . . . We see no changes in the progress 
around us which we can imagine likely to culminate in the 
evolution of forms distinct in the larger sense.” ( Melbourne 
Address.') 

2. The Non-Transmission of Acquired Characteristics 

The French scientists Delage and Goldsmith write: “Either 
there has been a hereditary transmission of acquired characters, 
or there has been no evolution at all.” ( The Theories of Evo¬ 
lution.) According to Prof. E. G. Conklin, Princeton Univer¬ 
sity, “Weismann introduced a new era in biology by denying 
the inheritance of all kinds of acquired characters, and by chal¬ 
lenging the world to produce evidence that would stand a 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


45 


rigorous analysis. He forever disposed of theories of 'pangenesis 
and the like by showing that the germ cells are not built up by 
contributions from the body and that characters are not trans¬ 
mitted from generation to generation; but on the other hand 
that there is transmitted a germ plasm which is relatively in¬ 
dependent of the body and which is relatively stable in organi¬ 
zation. Did the giraffe get his long neck because he browsed 
on trees (Darwin) or does he browse on trees because he has by 
inheritance a long neck? Did flying lead to the development’of 
wings (Darwin) or do birds fly because heredity has given them 
long wings? . . . The evidence is in favor of the second of 
these alternatives rather than of the first.” {Heredity and 
Environment , p. 313.) 

On another page Conklin writes: “The chief characters of 
every living thing are unalterably fixed by heredity. Men do 
not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles. Every living 
thing produces offspring after its kind. Men, horses, cattle; 
... all of the billion known species of animals and plants 
differ from one another because of inherited peculiarities, because 
they have come from different kinds of germ cells.” (Page 201.) 
If living things are unalterably fixed by heredity, how can one 
species become another, how can an animal, even the highest, 
become man? Does not Conklin’s view overthrow the evolution¬ 
istic doctrine of continuity? How can the amoeba become a 
man? So far as we have been able to discover, the question 
has never been answered. 

3. MendeVs Revolutionary Discovery 
The most revolutionary scientific discovery of modern times 
was that of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who, having 
experimented many years with peas, announced in 1865 a re¬ 
markable law now universally accepted by scientists and knock¬ 
ing the props from underneath the whole scheme of continuity 



46 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


as described above in Chapter I. He found that when he 
crossed a tall with a dwarf pea, all the first hybrid generation 
were tails, with no dwarfs or intermediates. Experimenting 
with peas of all sizes, shapes and colors, he found that the 
same law held. Taking the two characters of tallness and 
dwarfness, he found that there are only three kinds of peas y tails 
which breed true, dwarfs which breed true, and tall which 
yield the same definite proportion of tails and dwarfs. Many 
experiments conducted in recent years show that the same won¬ 
derful mathematical proportion exists throughout the whole 
plant and animal world. 

The law laid down by Mendel is sometimes known as that 
of Alternative Inheritance, according to which the offspring 
may show characters possessed by one parent or the other, but 
cannot develop any characters which were not latent in the 
ancestry. As the reader ought to grasp the significance of this 
great discovery we reproduce Bateson’s brief description: “The 
essence of the Mendelian principle is very easily exprssed. It 
is, first, that in great measure the properties of organisms are 
due to the presence of distinct, detachable elements, separately 
transmitted in heredity; and, secondly, that the parent cannot 
pass on to offspring an elementy and consequently the corre¬ 
sponding property , which it does not itself possess. iy 

This Mendelian principle is now regarded as universally 
valid in the plant and animal kingdom. The breeding of cattle, 
horses, sheep, etc., has been going on for thousands of years, 
but no fundamental modifications have ever been produced, or 
new species originated. Spencer’s idea of a change from the 
homogeneous to the heterogeneous is thus without a shadow of 
support from science. 



CHAPTER IV 


Is the Doctrine of Evolution a Satisfactory and 
Comprehensive World-View? 

T HAT there has been evolution in the sense of develop¬ 
ment within the type has been abundantly established, 
but that there is development from one type or species into 
another does not seem to have been proved; it is at most a 
matter of faith. 

Unless the doctrine of evolution can be shown to cover 
the universe of matter, force, energy, life, mind, spirit, it 
fails to meet the conditions of a satisfactory, all-comprehensive 
world-view. According to Genesis I the three realms of matter 
—force, life and personality—are absolutely distinct and the 
result of divine creation. This division into three spheres is 
supported by Professor J. A. Thomson in “Introduction to 
Science”: “(1) The physical order of nature, the inorganic 
world, where mechanism reigns; (2) the vital order of nature, 
the world of organisms, where mechanism proves insufficient; 
(3) the psychical order of nature, the world of mind, where 
mechanism is irrelevant. Thus there are three fundamental 
sciences: physics, biology and psychology.” Let it be stated 
once for all that, the relation of matter and force, matter and 
energy being in dispute, we employ the hyphenated phrases 
matter-force, matter-energy. 

How stands the cose on the side of science with its claim 
of absolute continuity? It was seen above that, according to 
Patten (p. 19), the origin and growth of stars, suns, earth, 
plants, animals, man are alleged to be parts of one process, and 
that one force, one law underlies the ascent from star-dust to 
man. Has this hypothesis been proved, has science shown that 
the lifeless or inorganic produced life, or the organic world? 

47 



48 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


Further, has science proved that mere life becomes mind, that 
the animal becomes man? 

A. The Sphere of Matter-Force; or Motion and Energy 
Whence is nature, or the physical world known to science? 
Is it eternal, or has it arisen in time? Is it a creation or an 
evolution, or in fact both? If the scientist were to allow that 
God created the physical world, he would logically be driven 
to allow that this much at least w r as a “special” creation; but 
as he on principle denies this, he is tempted to hold that the 
universe is eternal. Such indeed is the view of scientists who 
reject the Genesis cosmogony. Thus Professor H. E. Crampton, 
of Columbia University, writes: “Did things have a finite 
beginning and have they been ‘made’ by some supernatural 
force or forces, personal or impersonal, different from the 
agencies which we may see in operation at the present time? 
So says the doctrine of special creation.” (The Doctrine of 
Evolutio?i y p. 8.) He holds that the natural laws operative to¬ 
day produced the world and all therein. “This is the teaching 
of the doctrine of evolution.” (Page 10.) 

According to Crampton, Patten, C. W. Eliot and scientists 
generally, one force or energy is back of the evolutionary 
process, and such force or energy is eternal. Under their view 
the universe is a vast automatic mechanism. It must be stated, 
however, that the influential, vitalistic school antagonizes any 
such view. 

/. Difference between Creation and Evolution 
Creation is something fundamentally different from evolu¬ 
tion and implies that the origin of matter-force, life and per¬ 
sonality differs in kind and not merely in degree from what is 
going on in the universe today. We can settle the question of 
creation and evolution in a very simple manner. We can show 
that the laws of nature, as we understand them today, never 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


49 


produce the three realms mentioned above. This means that 
another and radically different agent was the cause of the 
primeval world-order. This line of investigation sweeps away 
the underpinning of present-day evolutionism. Again, evolution 
in the sense of a change from the homogeneous into the hetero¬ 
geneous would be proved if it were made clear that matter- 
force produces life, and life mind. We pursue both of these 
methods and hope to show that neither nature nor man today 
creates or evolves the heterogeneous out of the homogeneous, 
and that every such alleged creation or evolution is merely a 
combination of existing elements and factors. 

2. Matter and Energy 

If science were to regard matter as entirely distinct from 
energy, the old dualistic conception of matter and energy, 
matter and spirit would emerge; but since science is for the 
most part committed to a monistic viewpoint, it construes 
matter in terms of energy. Professor Tait writes: “The one 
[matter] is, as it were, the body of the physical universe; the 
other [energy'] is its life and activity.” The electronic theory 
of matter is now generally accepted. Everything is at bottom 
electricity, it is alleged, which is composed of electrons and 
protons. “Electrons are elements of so-called negative electricity, 
and protons elements of positive electricity. . . . The eighty 
or so known chemical elements are the products of radioactive 
disintegration. . . . Energy and the electrical elements are the 
postulates of the new science, the entities in terms of which 
all explanations of scientific phenomena must be made.” (John 
Mills, Within the Atom , pp. 4, 10, 39.) In other words, the 
new science regards everything, even life and mind, as merely 
different forms of energy. 

That science, which now is largely philosophy, accepts a 
baldly'monistic over against a dualistic distinction between matter 



50 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


and spirit, is the view of Professor More: “The aim of science 
is to explain phenomena by a single substance, which we may 
call either matter or electricity, and to endow this substance 
with a force of attraction which establishes the positions of the 
atoms of the substance and gives to them motion. This is 
undoubtedly a monistic doctrine, since it reduces phenomena to 
a single principle. From this simple philosophical postulate the 
physicist, including the chemist who has also followed this 
method, has attempted to construct a model of the world such 
that if we know past actions we can predict with a very con¬ 
siderable accuracy what will occur in the future.” (Op. cit., 
247.) Under this view all the events of the great World 
War, even the minutest details, could be foretold. 

Another says: “If according to science no energy can ever 
be created or destroyed, plainly mind cannot interfere with 
bodily processes; and, since man is descended from the lower 
animals, there is no reason why his actions should not be ex¬ 
plicable by the same general laws as theirs.” (J. B. Pratt, 
Matter and Spirit, p. 10.) 

3. Is Matter-Energy Eternal? 

Even if it were affirmed that matter is merely electricity, 
nothing would be gained, for the question must be answered 
whether it be a material or immaterial substance. What this 
energy is, and whether it has existed eternally or was a divine 
creation, science does not know, but inclines to the view that 
it is eternal. But such a position gives rise to difficulties. 
Since matter is imperfect and subject to change, it has no 
necessary existence and so cannot be eternal. If matter-force 
were eternal it would be self-moving; but this contravenes the 
law of inertia, namely, that matter remains at rest until moved 
from without. Years ago Locke argued that inert matter, having 
no self-motion, can not produce motion, even as non-entity can 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


51 


not produce entity. Even if it were alleged that eternal motion 
co-exists with eternal matter, they could not produce life or 
mind. Locke’s conclusion has never been disproved. 

That the history of the earth extends over millions of years 
has been established by science. It was once in a gaseous or 
molten state, but it has been cooling for millions of years. It 
gave off more heat than it received, and, so far as its energy is 
concerned, it has been and is a dying world. It may, of course, 
be alleged that this lost energy was carried to other planets 
and so was not lost absolutely, but only relatively. But this 
cannot be proved. Hence it is not known scientifically whether 
such energy is eternal or was created in time. 

4. Molecular Motion 

Recently the idea of the eternity of matter-force has been 
suggested in connection with the view of molecular motion . 
It is alleged that the ultimate atoms, electrons, molecules of 
matter, impinge upon each other, that is, have self-motion. This 
is at the bottom of the idea of “natural selection” and comes 
to a head in the scientific idea that inorganic matter becomes 
of itself organic matter. When the atoms elect to move in 
one way, a plant arises; when in another, an animal arises, and 
so on up to man. “The soul of man, just like the soul of 
animals, is a purely mechanical activity, the sum of the molecu¬ 
lar phenomena of motion in the particles of the brain. The 
will is never free. It depends upon the material processes in 
the nervous system.” (Haeckel, Creation , I, p. 179.) 

The answer is that mechanical motion obeys an invariable 
law and, left to itself, never varies in any particular, as seen 
in the case of gravity, which always acts in one direction. 
To affirm that the atom chooses to move in this direction or 
that is to endow it with mind and will. Though this idea has 
never been verified, it is at the basis of the current doctrine 



52 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


of evolution. Professor Maxwell, in an address before the 
British Association, argues that since the molecules of the ele¬ 
ments, as of hydrogen, whenever found, execute their vibrations 
in the same time, they are manufactured articles and preclude 
the thought of being eternal and self-existent. 

5. The Universe as a Self-Originated , Self-Running Machine 

The current scientific doctrine, not content to limit the 
laws of matter to the physical world, unhesitatingly extends 
them to life and mind in a closed system. It separates nature 
from God and subordinates spirit to matter. Thought is a 
mere product of certain forms of motion in nervous matter. 
Psychology is a branch of biology, this latter of physiology, and 
this latter a form of mechanics. 

The essence of this mechanical view was stated clearly by 
Haeckel: “The monism of the cosmos . . . proclaims the 
absolute dominion of the great iron laws through the universe. 
It shatters, at the same time, the three central dogmas of the 
dualistic philosophy—the personality of God, the immortality 
of the soul and the freedom of the will.” (.Riddle of the 
Universe.) Haeckel’s unpopular creed of forty years ago has 
become the accepted creed of science today. 

Scientists argue in a circle here, explaining matter in terms 
of energy and energy in terms of matter, or as says More: “If 
we explain all phenomena in terms of one principle, for example 
energy, what then is energy? And how shall we explain it 
except in terms of what we have already declared was explained 
by energy? Such, it seems to me, is the hopeless problem of 
all who attempt to build a monistic philosophy.” (Of. cit.> p. 
242.) 

More illustrates this current view by the example of a horse 
drawing a wagon. Some force in the earth “pushes the horse 
forward”; the horse does not by his own impulse bend his legs 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


53 


and push against the earth. Such nonsense might be accepted 
if a hobby-horse could change itself into a living horse and 
begin to move. 

6. Perpetual Motion 

The current mechanistic view that matter and energy are 
eternal is really a return to the exploded hypothesis of perpetual 
motion. The old idea that a machine could construct itself 
and run on forever is now abandoned as a violation of mechanical 
law. No machine is operated by self-generated power. In 
1605 Stevinus proved by means of a closed chain and an inclined 
plane that perpetual motion is impossible. Such, too, was the 
decision of the French Academy in 1775. 

Even if the law of the conservation of energy should be 
found to be absolutely true, which is far from being the case, 
it would at most only conserve what exists, and not produce 
anything new. 

7. The Physical Universe not Eternal 

The essence of current evolutionism was voiced by Haeckel: 
“The two fundamental forms of substance, ponderable matter 
and ether, ... are endowed with sensation and thought 
(though naturally of the lowest grade).” ( Riddle of the 
Universe , p. 78.) Of this affirmation Sir Oliver Lodge writes: 
“In order to explain life, mind and consciousness, all that is 
done is to assume that matter possesses these unexplained attri¬ 
butes.” Under any such view the universe of matter must be 
regarded as eternal and infinite—in short, takes the place of 
God—and by evolution, not by a primitive creation, becomes 
what it is. In fact, those scientists who endow inert matter with 
sensation and life are but revamping the view of the Greek 
philosopher Anaximander, founder of the doctrine of a hylo- 
zoistic, mechanistic monism—the view that matter is life. 



54 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


The claim is constantly made that nature and natural law 
have created all things, even life and personality. Let the 
reader, however, turn to More’s critique of this view as pre¬ 
sented in Conklin’s “Direction of Evolution”: “He does not 
tell us how natural law was instituted nor why, if it was in¬ 
stituted, it cannot be superseded by its institutor. Many of us 
do not see why the idea of an incomprehensible natural law is 
more rational than the idea of a God. Again, is a universe 
created out of nothing and set going by a Creator and Ruler a 
less satisfactory belief than a universe uncreated, or self- 
created?” (Of. cit ., p. 25.) 

8. Origin of Matter—Summary 

Before the discovery of radioactivity, scientists settled the 
question of the nature of matter by reference to the law of 
the conservation of matter-force, namely, that matter can be 
neither created nor destroyed. But now it is known that ele¬ 
ments of high atomic weight, like uranium and thorium, are 
constantly giving off particles and are thus by loss changed into 
other elements, such as radium, niton, polonium and lead. As 
matters now stand, two things are certain: as scientists we do 
not know how matter originated, but we know that matter is 
decomposing, and that the universe of matter is running down. 
In other words, not development and evolution, but degeneration, 
dissipation, dissolution, devolution, are taking place. 

It follows that the universe of matter and energy could not 
have been eternal, that it was not brought into existence by any 
known physical or chemical laws. The only alternative is that 
it was created by God. 

So far, then, as the first sphere, that of matter-force, matter- 
energy, goes, the doctrine of evolution fails absolutely to supply 
a satisfactory and comprehensive world-view. 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


55 


B. The Sphere of Life 

According to the current theory of evolution life must be 
regarded as a product of the inorganic or lifeless; otherwise 
the assumed law of continuity breaks down. Unless it can be 
shown that matter-force becomes in some mysterious way plant 
and animal life, the doctrine of evolution fails to meet the 
conditions of an all-comprehensive world-view. 

/. Dilemma of Evolutionists on the Origin of Life 

Evolutionists are accordingly in a dilemma. Either they 
must prove that life came from the lifeless or allow that the 
dogma breaks down where it ought to be strongest. This is 
admitted by candid scientists. Huxley writes: “If the hy¬ 
pothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have originated 
from non-living matter, for, by the hypothesis, the condition 
of the globe was at one time such that living matter could not 
have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the 
gaseous state.” {Anatomy of Invertebrate Animals , f. 41.) 
Professor Joseph Le Conte says: “If life did once arise sponta¬ 
neously from any lower forces, physical or chemical, by natural 
process, the conditions necessary for so extraordinary a change 
could hardly be expected to occur but once in the history of 
the earth. They are, therefore, now not only unreproducible, 
but unimaginable.” ( Evolution, etc.) 

Professor R. S. Lull of Yale quotes his colleague L. L. 
Woodruff, professor of biology, as saying: “We thus reach the 
general conclusion that, so far as human observation and ex¬ 
perimentation go, no form of life arises today except from 
pre-existing life.” ( Evolution of the Earthy f. 93.) Referring 
to Virchow’s contention that every cell is the offspring of a 
pre-existing parent cell, Professor E. B. Wilson says: “This 
conclusion rests upon a foundation so firm that we are justified 
in regarding it as a universal law of development. . . . The 



56 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


study of the cell has on the whole seemed to widen rather 
than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest 
forms of life from the inorganic world.” ( The Cell , etc.) 

2. Vain Attempts to Solve the Riddle of Life 

Stubbornly affirming, in the face of facts to the contrary, 
that the law of continuity knows no exception, radical scien¬ 
tists declare that in some way life came from dead matter. 
Thus Naegeli boldly asserts: “The origin of the organic from 
the inorganic is not a question of experience and experiment, 
but a fact deduced from the law of the constancy of matter 
and force.” Here the law of constancy is assumed as having 
no exception—a thing never yet proved, and so it cannot be 
the basis of an argument. Dr. H. C. Bastian in a ponderous 
volume seeks to prove spontaneous generation and roundly as¬ 
serts: “New births of living matter have ever been taking 
place on the earth since the time when such processes first 
became possible.” Unfortunately he does not cite any ex¬ 
amples, nor show how they take place. 

Professor H. F. Osborn, Columbia University, unflinchingly 
places himself on record as follows: “The more modern scien¬ 
tific opinion is that life arose from a recombination of forces 
pre-existing in the cosmos. . . . We may express as our own 
opinion, based upon the application of uniformitarian evolu¬ 
tionary principles, that when life appeared on the earth some 
energies pre-existing in the cosmos were brought into relation 
with the chemical elements already existing.” (The Origin and 
Evolution of Life } p. 2.) As the “pre-existing elements” were 
matter and force, life, under Osborn’s view, arose from the 
inorganic world—an assumption without a shadow of proof. 
And yet we are told that science deals with facts. 

3. Life and Not-Life 

Life as we know it today is associated with matter. The 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


57 


simplest form is protoplasm, regarded as the physical basis of 
life. It is a slimy, grayish, transparent substance, somewhat 
like the white of an egg. Chemically it is composed of various 
fats, proteids, carbohydrates, etc. But what constitutes its inner 
nature or essence has baffled the wisdom and ingenuity of scien¬ 
tists despite all their retorts and microscopes. 

Physically and chemically, all kinds of protoplasm, whether 
of a blade of grass or of a man, are alike, and yet they are 
radically different, though the difference is not discernible by 
microscopes of the highest magnifying power; and for the 
reason that the stuff is alive. Even dead protoplasm, or its 
characteristic element, proteid, escapes analysis. 

The difference between life and not-life is found in their 
nature and origin. Both crystals and plants grow, the former 
on the outside, the latter on the inside. Even movement does 
not constitute an absolute distinction, for seeds have been known 
to lie dormant thousands of years and then grow when proper 
conditions were supplied. Neither growth nor movement is 
the real difference. 

What Henry Drummond said fifty years ago is still true: 
“No change of substance, no modification of environment, no 
chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any 
evolution, can endow a single atom of the mineral world with 
the attribute of life. Only by the bending down into this 
dead world of some living form can these dead atoms be 
gifted with the properties of vitality; without this preliminary 
contact with life they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere 
forever.” (Natural Law in the Spiritual World , chap. 1.) 

4. What is Biogenesis? 

Though life is associated with matter it is not the pro¬ 
duct of matter. The old maxim, omne vivum ex vivo, “all life 
from life,” still holds true. The scientific word for this is 



58 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


biogenesis, defined by Webster as “the doctrine that the genesis 
of living organisms can take place only through living germs 
or parents.” Abiogenesis is the doctrine of “spontaneous genera¬ 
tion.” According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “no biological 
generalization rests on a wider series of observations, or has 
been subjected to a more critical scrutiny, than that every 
living organism has come into existence from a living portion 
or portions of a pre-existing organism.” 

5. Cows* Milk Manufactured according to Henry Ford 
According to the New York Tribune , Henry Ford is reported 
to have said: “It is a simple matter to take the grains the cow 
eats and make them into milk superior to the natural article. 
The cow is the crudest machine in the world. . . . Our labora¬ 
tories have already demonstrated that cow’s milk can be done 
away with.” There is, however, one objection to the artificial 
milk: it sickens babes, just as artificial honey sickens bees. 

Ford’s idle boast is matched by that of the New Jersey 
veterinarian who affirmed that he “could make a better cow 
than God ever made.” Up to date neither Ford’s artificial 
milk nor the manufactured cow has been placed on the Chicago 
market. 

Science has many things to its credit, but it cannot manu¬ 
facture life in any form, whether a grain of wheat or an 
amoeba. As says A. W. McCann: “Science can assemble every 
element known to exist in the grain of wheat—proteins, nucleo- 
proteins, phosphotides, carbo-hydrates, fats, phosphorus, iodine, 
chlorine, and fluorine, salts of iodine, iron, potassium, calcium, 
manganese, sodium, silicon, including the extraordinary sub¬ 
stances known as vitamines, but science cannot make the com¬ 
bination sprout in the ground.” ( God or Gorilla , p. 99.) 

6. Life a Rejuvenation , not a Creation , says Science 
In connection with the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


59 


scientists presented to the court in the form of affidavits an 
elaborate argument for their side of the case, containing some 
65,000 words. Among the men contributing papers we find 
Professor H. H. Newman, University of Chicago; W. A. Nelson, 
State geologist of Tennessee; C. R. Judd, Chicago; K. A. Mather, 
Harvard University; Dr. Fay-Cooper Cole, Field Museum, 
Chicago, and Dr. W. A. Kepner, University of Virginia. The 
chief arguments, voiced by Professor Mather and covering four 
columns of the New York Times , July 21, 1925, may be re¬ 
garded as reflecting the latest evolutionistic attitude. It is 
remarkable as much for what it omits as for what it contains. 
It claims that there is no conflict between current evolutionism 
and religion, that the geological eras reveal a steady, unin¬ 
terrupted advance from the lowest to the highest forms of life, 
despite the numerous breaks and chasms admitted by most 
geologists, and that the Java man is a connecting link (though 
he does not employ that phrase) between man and the ape. 

The omissions are glaring and significant. Making no at¬ 
tempt at a definition of evolution (a studied oversight by all 
the writers of the other papers also), Professor Mather juggles 
with the word to his heart’s content, claims everything “in 
sight and out of sight” and mixes up in an unparralleled 
mishmash true and false meanings of the word, to the utter 
bewilderment of the unprofessional reader and amazement of 
the thinker and specialist. He fails to distinguish between the 
old and legitimate use of the word to denote change, progress 
and development of the homogeneous and of the type, and 
evolution as a world-philosophy, denoting a change from the 
homogeneous to the heterogeneous and covering suns, stars, 
plants, animals and man. Such a procedure on the part of 
scientists is highly censurable, for it hoodwinks the public into 
the belief that all this has been proved. He leaves no doubt 



60 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


that he accepts the current view of one force or energy at the 
bottom of life and mind. 

Most unsatisfactory is his account of the origin of matter 
and life. As to matter he writes: “Science has not even a 
guess as to the source of matter. All acceptable theories of 
earth origin are theories of rejuvenation rather than of creation 
from nothing.” “Rejuvenation rather than creation”! Re¬ 
juvenation from what? Rejuvenation means “to make young.” 
How can you make young that which does not exist? What a 
miserable camouflage! It is a new term suggested by the 
desperate predicament of science in declining to accept the 
idea of a primeval divine creation. This view certainly re¬ 
veals in a glaring manner a conflict between science and Christi¬ 
anity. 

Then as to life, saying that there is no direct record of 
whence life came, he continues: “I believe that life as we know 
it is but one manifestation of the mysterious spiritual power 
which permeates the universe.” It is not quite clear what this is 
intended to express. If it refers to “the Spirit of God moving 
upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), and imparting 
motion, force, light, heat, etc., it is unobjectionable. In that 
case God is conceived of as transcendent and prior to the phys¬ 
ical universe. This is perhaps Professor Mather’s meaning, 
for he speaks of God as “the author of the universe.” If, 
however, the expression refers to some “power” resident in 
the universe from eternity and producing life and all things, 
it is the old pantheism, panpsychism, hylozoism and the elan 
vital of Bergson all in one. 

According to Mather, “the primitive cell was the result,” 
not of a creative act of God, but “of the mysterious spiritual 
power permeating the universe,” As Mather writes the pivotal 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


61 


word power, and not Power, he seems to have in mind not a 
person, but merely a force. 

7. Strange Bedfellows at the Scopes Trial 
The Scopes trial was characterized by nothing so much as 
by the divergent and in fact contradictory viewpoints of the 
counsel for the defense. Christian theists, believing scientists, 
noncommittal biologists, infidels and agnostics joined in the 
effort to make it appear that evolutionism is not anti-Christian, 
but the true Gospel. At one extreme was Professor Kirtley F. 
Mather, a Christian theist; at the other Clarence Darrow, an 
avowed agnostic and fatalist. Their viewpoints mix like fire 
and water. It looks as if Professor Mather had been pressed 
into the case to pull evolutionistic chestnuts out of the fire. 

(a) Professor Mather's Viewpoint 
We read in the New York Times that Professor Mather is 
a member of the Baptist church at Newton Centre, Massachusetts, 
and a teacher in its Bible school. His paper contains some 
fine and correct but damaging statements. He holds that there 
is “no necessity for choosing between evolution and religion” 
if in our interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis 
God be regarded as “the author and administrator of the uni¬ 
verse.” He says that the idea of evolution does not dethrone 
the idea of God in any reasonable mind, “for evolution is not 
a power, not a force; it is a process, a method. God is a power, 
a force; He necessarily uses processes and methods for dis- 
person, but merely a force. 

Whether God be dethroned or not depends upon what evo¬ 
lution is understood to be and how much or little God is 
understood to do. According to Professor E. D. Cope, evolu¬ 
tion is creation, and creation evolution. This view is shared 
by other evolutionists, as by Professor Patten, who says that 
“cosmic and organic evolution, the growth of stars, suns, plants, 



62 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


animals and man are one continuous, all-pervading process of 
creation.” If this position is held by any considerable number 
of scientists, evolution is no longer a method of God’s pro¬ 
cesses, but a power or force in nature from all eternity, as 
seen above. How does Mather reconcile these materialistic, 
monistic ideas of evolution with his own theism? 

According to answers to Professor James H. Leuba’s ques¬ 
tionnaire (Belief in God and Immortality '), the ratio of scholars 
believing in the existence of God is: psychologists, 14 per cent; 
biologists, 16; sociologists, 18; historians, 32; physical scien¬ 
tists, 35. Of the men who answered the questionnaire more 
than sixty per cent were college and university professors, 
twelve per cent men employed by the United States Govern¬ 
ment, and eleven per cent men employed in the various in¬ 
dustries. If Leuba’s conclusions are even approximately cor¬ 
rect, less than twenty-five per cent of scientists are theists in 
the Christian sense of “a God in intellectual and effective 
communication with man.” 

Whatever the number of scientists may be who as a formal 
concession to the traditional view allow that there is a God 
of some sort, it seems clear that those who reject the Genesis 
cosmogony are far in the majority. It is, however, a source of 
gratification to know that Professor Mather seems to reflect an 
essentially Christian theism. But the attitude of another Scopes 
defendant is in marked contrast with that of Professor Mather. 
(b) Viewpoint of Attorney Clarence Darrow 

It is well known that Clarence Darrow, the Chicago crim¬ 
inal lawyer, chief counsel for Scopes, is an avowed and un¬ 
compromising agnostic, determinist and fatalist. In a press 
dispatch, September 30, 1924, he is represented as saying: “Our 
work is all laid out for us. We live on bunk. Our birth, our 
religion, our marriage are decided by fate. It is a matter of 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


63 


fate whether a man dies an honored character or dies on the 
gallows.” 

In the debate in Chicago, October 26, 1925, between 
Bishop F. J. McConnell of Pittsburgh and Clarence Darrow, 
the latter championed the mechanistic theory of the universe 
and of man, saying, among other things: “If you follow one 
step at a time, all life may fairly be called a machine, all 
earth is a oneness; all life is a oneness [the soul included]. 

. . . The mind is a by-product of human activities. All 
animal life has it to some extent. The mind is the result of 
machinery [a secretion of the brain, said the materialists of 
a generation ago].” According to the Associated Press, Mr. 
Darrow compared man to an engine; by itself it created nothing; 
the body returned to the 25 or 30 chemical elements from 
which it was made and the individual was gone. Mr. Darrow 
then expressed his agnostic views, saying that he did not know 
how the universe came to be and that it was an assumption to 
say how it happened. This again is proof that evolutionists 
have no adequate world-theory. 

It is generally allowed that the agnosticism of Herbert 
Spencer and Thomas J. Huxley means that all knowledge is 
relative, uncertain and misleading, that God’s existence cannot 
be known and that the nature of the universe is unknowable. 
Darrow’s view does not seem to be different, except that, being 
a determinist, he of course denies free agency and bases all 
human activity on an iron-clad fatalism, which is directly 
antithetic to theism, the doctrine that, while God is absolute 
and just in all his relations to mankind and the world, man is 
a free agent responsible for all his acts. Man in a relatively 
independent way strangely enough so acts as to attain the divine 
aim and purpose in history. Darrow could naturally hold 
that any criminal is driven to his deeds by an antecedent force 



64 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


over which he has no control. It need not be added that any 
such scheme is subversive of all laws against crime. 

Here, then, we have an avowed Christian and an avowed 
agnostic or atheist contending that evolutionism, as usually 
understood, is true and not in conflict with Christianity, but 
explaining Christianity along the only lines consonant with 
modern scientific thought. We wonder if Professor Mather 
has forgotten the episode of the Trojan horse and Virgil’s 
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (“I fear the Greeks even when 
they bear gifts”). “Shall two walk together except they have 
agreed?” ( Amos y 3:3.) 

In other words, evolution, as understood by Darrow and 
the skeptical scientists of Leuba’s questionnaire, is either not 
the evolution taught by Mather, or is at bottom the same 
atheistic farrago, only phrased in “ein bischen anderen Woertern ” 
—in somewhat different terms. As a matter of fact, however, 
Professor Mather, with all his professions of belief in the 
teachings of Scripture, fails to give a clear-cut theory of how 
much God created and how much he left to development, or 
evolution in the legitimate old sense. 

(i c ) Liberals and the Devil's Broth at Dayton 

It is significant, too, that the Civil Liberties Union of 
New York, understood to entertain semi-Christian, if not anti- 
Christian, principles, rushed to the defense of Scopes and em¬ 
ployed Dudley Field Malone and Arthur A. Hays, liberal- 
minded lawyers, to assist Darrow in ridiculing the Biblical 
account of creation. In fact, as says the newspaper correspond¬ 
ent Robert T. Small, in a Consolidated Press dispatch: “Dayton 
has begun to think there are too many cooks in this Scopes case 
and that the devil’s broth, or whatever kind of broth the funda¬ 
mentalists call this evolution stuff, is in grave danger of being 
spoiled. There are primary counsel and secondary counsel and 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


65 


tertiary attorneys, home talent and imported stars of the bar, 
and they, being many men of many minds, naturally are pulling 
one way and another.” 

Small might have added, in the language of Professor Ver¬ 
non Kellogg: “Evolution is defined in a score of ways, but 
not clearly in any way. Each one defines it for himself, and 
no two define it alike. . . . We need a general treaty of 
understanding.” (The World's Work , May, 1924.) Does not 
Professor Kellogg see the absurdity of asking people to accept 
evolution before we know what it is, whether a “gold brick” or 
the genuine article? 

In other words, while all evolutionists were shouting: “Great 
is the goddess Evolution,” at Dayton, “some cried one thing, 
some another; for the assembly was in confusion; and the more 
part knew not wherefore they were come together.” (Acts, 
19:32.) 


8. Mechanism and Vitalism 

Concerning the origin of life there has long been a contro¬ 
versy between the rival schools of mechanism and vitalism. 
According to the former, life is interpreted in terms of chemical 
and physical forces and the movements of the smallest particles 
of matter. According to vitalism, vital phenomena cannot be 
expressed by merely chemical and mechanical factors, but 
constitute a realm or sphere distinct from the physical. As 
seen above, the life-principle appropriates chemical and mineral 
elements for its use, but “the difference between vitalism and 
the mechanical theory of life is not that the one regards the 
processes in the organism as opposed to those in the inorganic 
world, while the other identifies them, but that vitalism regards 
life as a combination of chemical and physical processes, with 
the co-operation and under the regulation of other principles. 



66 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


while the mechanical theory leaves these other principles out.” 
(Otto, Naturalism and Religion , p. 192.) 

Both schools can boast able champions. Until the close of 
the nineteenth century, the mechanism of Holbach, Feuerbach, 
Buechner, Haeckel and a number of Germans was in the as¬ 
cendant. Since that time, vitalists have had numerous accessions 
to their ranks, among them Professors Driesch, Wolf, Reinke, 
Neumeister and Schneider in Germany, not to mention some 
Americans, especially Professor Jacques Loeb of the University 
of Chicago. “These men hold that although we have suc¬ 
ceeded in determining the physical or chemical factors that 
enter into many of the phenomena of life, and in analyzing 
the conditions necessary or useful in the accomplishment of 
certain functions, we have not accounted for a single vital 
phenomenon solely by the combination of inorganic activities, 
considering it as a whole and taking into account the character¬ 
istics that distinguish the organic from the inorganic.” (Micou, 
Basic Ideals in Religion , p. 219.) 

Loeb writes: “We are not yet able to give an answer to 
the question as to how life originated on the earth. The gap 
in our knowledge which we feel most keenly is the fact that 
the chemical character of the catalyzers (the enzymes or fer¬ 
ments) are still unknown.” ( The Mechanical Concept of Life.) 

Not a few scientific experts regard the ultimate analysis 
of life into mechanical processes as the ideal of their science. 
Hence zeal often outruns knowledge. “The whole mechanical 
theory is based upon a law which is not strictly biological but 
belongs to science in general—the law of the conservation of 
matter and energy.” (Otto, of. cit. y p. 194.) But according to 
the latest physics “the essential postulate of the conservation 
of matter is contradicted by the quantitative results of every 
experiment made by us in the chemical laboratory, and no 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


67 


one knows anything about the quantity of matter in any body 
not on the earth.” (More, op. cit ., p. 259.) 

“The living machine,” as says Claude Bernard, “is char¬ 
acterized, not by the nature of its physico-chemical properties, 
but by the creation of the machine according to a definite 
idea. This grouping takes place according to the laws that 
govern the physico-chemical properties of matter, but what is 
essential to life’s domain, which belongs neither to physics nor 
to chemistry, is the directing idea of vital evolution.” 

Fifty years ago Professor John Tyndall in a presidential 
address before the British Association declared that matter con¬ 
tains the promise and potency of every form of life. In 1898 Sir 
William Crookes, as president of the same association, reversed 
the dictum, declaring that in life he sazv the 'promise and, potency 
of every form of matter. 

Kant, in one of his later works, remarks that it is vain to 
hope that “some day a Newton will appear who will be able 
to make even the generation of grass comprehensible by natural 
laws without the intervention of deity.” Modern biologists are 
wont to say that Kant lacked the requisite knowledge. “But,” 
says More, “it is not a question of more or less knowledge; it 
is still the confession of no knowledge we must make. There is 
only one way to obtain this knowledge. Let the biologist in 
the laboratory produce a living cell which has not been derived 
from other living matter. That would convince us that life 
is a manifestation of physical energy, just as the physicist has 
shown in his laboratory that matter does attract matter and has 
thus verified Newton’s law of gravitation. Until he creates a 
living cell from dead matter, he is in the same class as was 
Aristotle, who tells us that dust breeds fleas.” {Op. cit. y p. 247.) 

9. Wide Gap between Vital and Non-Vital Matter 
It is constantly affirmed that the gap between vital and 



68 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


non-vital matter is so small as to be scarcely noticeable and that 
the latter can with suitable conditions become or produce life. 
Such, however, is not the view of high scientific authorities. 
Thus Professor Haldane writes: “The physical and chemical 
conception of the world breaks down absolutely and hopelessly 
in connection with the phenomena of life, however useful it 
actually is in connection with inorganic phenomena. It is, 
therefore, nothing but a working hypothesis of limited useful 
application.” Similarly Lord Kelvin: “The properties of living 
matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, 
and the present state of cur knowledge furnishes no link be¬ 
tween the living and the non-living.” 

Writers like Herbert Spencer, Lewes, John Dewey, and 
functional and behavioristic psychologists generally, regard life 
as a mere energy or activity. “Life and mind,” says G. H. Lewes, 
“are processes; neither is a substance; neither is a force. . . . 
There is, however, a product.” ( Life and Mind.) But how 
can there be a product without a producer? Dewey writes: 
“Self is an activity. It is not something which acts; it is activity. 

... It is constituted by activities. Through its activities 
the soul is.” ( Psychology , 247.) But how' can there be activity 
without a subject that acts? 

Herbert Spencer’s verbose definition runs: “Life is the 
definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simul¬ 
taneous and successive, in correspondence with external co¬ 
existences and sequences.” (Biology.) This is equivalent to 
saying that a boiling tea-kettle is alive. 

10. Physical Life a Sphere Distinct from Matter on the 
One Side and Personality on the Other 

The foregoing review shows that according to Huxley, Le 
Conte, Virchow, Drummond, E. B. Wilson, More and others 
the current doctrine of evolution breaks down, for the organic 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


69 


world cannot be proved to arise out of the inorganic. In other 
words, the law of continuity, the cornerstone of evolution, fails 
in the case of life (which, next to personality, is the root 
question in this discussion) and consequently fails as an all- 
inclusive world-view. 

In this dilemma, extremists like Naegeli, Bastian, Spencer, 
Dewey and Osborn boldly affirm that in some unknown way 
matter produced life. The issue, therefore, is clearly defined. 
There is no middle ground. Either life is a product of matter- 
force, or it is a creation. However, it is never safe to say 
that such and such a thing or event can never be. Years ago 
an Englishman wrote a book arguing that steam could never 
propel a ship. But it so happened that the vessel bearing a 
copy of the book to America was propelled by steam. Hence 
in this case it is theoretically possible that any day some chemist 
may prove that life has been produced from lifeless matter. 

Hence one should beware of affirming that the desired 
proof will never be forthcoming. The most that can be said 
is that, so far as science is able to determine, the two realms 
are distinct, separated by a chasm unbridged thus far. That, 
however, is enough to establish our contention. 

The trend of the best scientific thought is in the direction 
of the theory that life is unique and of an order fundamentally 
different from the inorganic realm. According to R. F. A. 
Hoernle, a recent British writer: “The concept of life is a 
distinctive concept, of a different order from physical or chem¬ 
ical concepts, and not reducible to them by analysis. Life is 
sui generis , qualitatively unique.” ( Matter , Life , Mind and 
Cody p. 110.) Other definitions of life convey the same idea, 
as Haldane’s “an active autonomous whole,” J. A. Thompson’s 
“an insurgent self-assertion,” and the proverbial- “will to live,” 
and even Bergson’s “elan vital” 



70 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


In other words, “science is unable to analyze the inner 
nature of life; it is a secret; the scientist who undertakes to 
analyze it, kills it. The vitalists, who wage war on the mechan¬ 
ists, are in the same dilemma, for they in turn can give no 
account of the origin of life, and in fact indirectly presuppose 
something akin to the Biblical view of creation. Between 
the Scylla of mechanism and the Charybdis of vitalism the 
whole evolutionistic scheme suffers shipwreck and can be res¬ 
cued only by the Biblical cosmogony.” (A. S. Zerbe, Chris¬ 
tianity and. False Evolutionism , p. 243.) 

Some authorities, as Henderson and Hoernle, favor a “tele¬ 
ological” vitalism. It is held that “organisms are individ¬ 
uals, i. e ., stable, durable systems maintaining their equilibrium 
(or self-identity) in the flux of chemico-physical processes.” 
If this view grants consciousness it differs little from psycho¬ 
logical vitalism; if it denies consciousness it is only the ordinary 
vitalism of Reinke and Driesch. 

The whole subject may be summed up in the language of 
the Duke of Argyll: “We know as certainly as we know any¬ 
thing in the physical sciences, that organic life must have had 
a definite beginning in time upon this globe. If so, then 
that beginning cannot possibly have been by way of common 
parentage or ordinary generation. Some other process must 
have been employed, however little we are able' to conceive 
what it was. . . . All our desperate attempts, therefore, to 
get rid of the idea of creation as distinct from mere procrea¬ 
tion are self-condemned as futile.” (Organic Evolution Cross- 
Examined , p. 113.) 

C. The Sphere of Man 

According to both Scripture and true science, man, in 
spite of all outward resemblance to the highest animal, is in 
a class or sphere by himself. Evolutionists are not agreed as 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


71 


to his origin. Some allow that he is a divine creation; others 
regard the soul as merely successive states of consciousness, 
without an abiding self; others agree with Professor Irwin 
Edman of Columbia, that “man is a mere accident,” and that 
“immortality is a sheer illusion.” The great question of the 
day, therefore, is, what is man? Has he a never-dying soul? 
Or is he merely an animal, and does he die like a dog? 

Since the chasm between man and the highest animal today 
is wide and unbridged, the doctrine of evolution breaks down 
in the case of man. To save it, evolutionists have literally left 
no stone unturned and have gone to the ends of the earth to 
find the “missing link.” What success they have had we 
proceed to consider. 

D. Search for the Missing Link 

Daily newspapers, magazines and books on evolution convey 
the impression that man has unquestionably descended from 
a lower order of animals. In June, 1921, a New York daily 
said: “None but a fool would dare criticise the theory of 
man’s descent from an ape, because it is the commonly accepted 
opinion of mankind.” If that editor is not a consummate ass 
he has learned by this time that no scientist of rank now holds 
that man has descended from an ape and that the “commonly 
accepted opinion of mankind” is the other way. 

1. Exhumed Ancient Skulls and Evolution 

Charles Darwin having declared that all forms of life, 
including plants and animals, were descended from three or 
four progenitors, it was a natural inference that man was in¬ 
cluded in the sweeping assertion. There were, however, no 
facts in support of the proposition, but it was necessary in 
order to render the evolution hypothesis complete and sym¬ 
metrical. As matters stood, the chain connecting man and the 



72 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


ape lacked some important links. If, now, the skull, teeth, 
arms or legs of some animal, as an ape or chimpanzee, should 
be found in some part of the earth and be made to appear to 
resemble man, the desired missing link would be supplied and 
the argument would be complete. 

During the last thirty years such supposed “links” have 
been found. Just as in the case of fossils of extinct animals, 
so here, fragments, and small ones at that, have been unearthed, 
necessitating “restorations” of the missing parts according to 
the ideas of the restorer. Hence from a small part of a skull, 
jawbone or pelvis an enterprising scientist with a vivid im¬ 
agination undertakes to show what the creature looked like 
500,000 years ago. The procedure is the biggest humbug of 
the age. The “restorationists” are cunning psychologists and 
believe, doubtless, that a “sucker” is born every minute. 

The American Museum of Natural History in New York 
contains the largest and most carefully prepared collection of 
supposed pre-human, semi-human or human skeletal remains 
in the world. They were “restored” by Professor H. F. 
Osborn with the assistance of other scholars. The reader who 
visits the Field Museum in Chicago will notice that the “restora¬ 
tions” of man exhibited in the rotunda are fac-similes of the 
New York collection. 

2. Description of the Restorations 

In the New York Museum are five glass-covered cases 
containing the restorations. Aiming at accuracy, we quote 
liberally from an article by Professor Osborn in Vol. XX of 
Natural History (the journal of the Museum), as also from 
his “Men of the Old Stone Age” and from his article, “Where 
Did Man Originate?” in Asia , June, 1924. In the former 
publication we read: “On the right half of Case I are arranged 
the skulls of certain anthropoid apes— (1) gibbon, (2) orang, 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


73 


(3) chimpanzee, (4) adult gorilla, (5) young gorilla, while 
on the left are models of skulls of the known races of man 
[observe the words “known races of man,” not of ape-men], 
(7) Piltdown, (8) Neanderthal, (9) Talgai [skull, however, of 
an Australian black boy shot and buried on the spot in 1848, 
according to Archibald Meston, Chief Protector of Australian 
Aborigines], (10) Cro-Magnon, (11) recent. Between these 
two groups have been placed a restoration of the skull and of 
the head of the Trinil or ape-man of Java (Pithecanthropus erec- 
tus) and a cast of the actually discovered brain-case and two 
of the teeth.” (Page 231.) Pithecanthropus is Greek for 
ape-man. 

Chief objects in Case II: “The most ancient fossil relic of 
man is the massive jaw which was found near Heidelberg in 
deposits of the second Interglacial stage [guesswork] perhaps 
as early as 200,000 B. C. A skull has been modeled to fit this 
jaw [and to fit the evolutionary hypothesis] by Professor Mc¬ 
Gregor. . . . The size of the brain is more doubtful, but it 
was at least of the type of the Neanderthal skull.” 

Case III contains restoration of the alleged “immediate 
predecessor of modern man, the Neanderthal race, of the Mid¬ 
dle Old Stone Age in Europe, from about 50,000 to 25,000 
B. C.” We read: “A race of long-headed men was established 
over Western Europe before the last Glacial period. . . . 
These represent what is probably a distinct species of man 
(Homo neanderthalensis)” 

All the proof for the claim that man has descended from 
some lower order is contained in these three ordinary-sized 
cases. The actual original “finds” furnishing the basis for the 
exuberant fancy of the “specialists” would not fill a half-bushel 
measure. The Hall of the Age of Man might well be called 
Hall of Fictions Extraordinary. 



74 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


3. Beginning of Man according to Evolution 

Since, according to science, the amoeba gradually developed 
into a man, it becomes an interesting problem to determine 
when an animal, as an ape, ceased to be an ape and became 
a man. Osborn allows that “man is not descended from any 
known ape, either living or fossil, but a hypothetical ancestor 
[that is, a guess is made the' basis of the elaborate argument— 
fine logic!] of this entire anthropoid group, founded on a jaw 
discovered in Egypt, is the Profliofithecus Haeckeli” Un¬ 
commonly clever reasoning: “a jaw [who knows what kind of a 
jaw?] discovered in Egypt” is the “hypothetical ancestor” of 
hypothetical “ancestors of anthropoids,” the alleged ancestors 
of the Piltdown and Neanderthal man, the hypothetical an¬ 
cestors of the present human race. Like the augurs of old, the 
Osborn contingent must chuckle in their sleeves in thus “put¬ 
ting one over” on a sleepy public. 

The region of the globe in which man originated is in 
dispute. According to Professor Osborn, the Age of Man began 
500,000 years ago in some region of Asia not yet explored by 
paleontologists. Recently, however, Professor H. J. Spinden 
of Harvard has revived the hypothesis of an African origin. 
See New York Times , Feb. 15, 1925. Osborn admits that 
“fossil remains of man are exceedingly rare. . . . Only two 
races, the Heidelberg and the Piltdown, are certainly known 
[that is, if far-fetched inferences constitute knowledge], from 
the river drifts and gravels before the period of burials.” Os¬ 
born writes: “Man has a long line of ancestry of his own, 
perhaps two millions or more years in length.” 

There being absolutely no proofs of a missing link, scien¬ 
tists have of late taken the position that both apes and men 
have sprung from a semi-ape, one stage earlier. Hence, says 
Spinden, evolutionists are not looking for proofs of a missing 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


75 


link because “your thoroughgoing evolutionist looks at life as 
one continuous and expanding existence, leading from lowly 
organisms of one cell up to the highest animals.” (N. Y. Times.) 
In other words, your up-to-the-minute scientist does not look 
for facts, but forces things into his procrustean bed of con¬ 
tinuity. By the way, what is “a mist of the infinite” in which, 
according to Spinden, life originated? 

At the same time, evolutionists none ,the less are almost 
every day finding traces of missing links. Dr. R. L. Ditmars 
announced in the New York Evening Telegram , August 28, 
1921, that an expedition headed by Roy Andrews and fully 
equipped was to penetrate the interior of Thibet in search of 
the missing link. There are many “low-brow” apes, but Dit¬ 
mars was certain that “high-brow” apes abound in Thibet and 
he proposed to corral some and introduce them to New York 
society. An Associated Press dispatch under date of November 
4, 1925, announced that Andrews had just arrived in San 
Francisco from the “cradle of life” (so-called) with a large 
collection of fossils of the Stone Age, but with no fossils of 
apes or primitive man. Thus after four years another bubble 
has burst. 

4. Chronological Sequence of Fossil Men 

Professor Osborn and his co-laborers seek to show that, 
beginning with the hypothetical Pro'plio'pithecus of Haeckel, 
the fossil men can be arranged in a gradually ascending scale 
from the Piltdown (possibly the Foxhall), Java, Heidelberg, 
Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man up to modern man. Un¬ 
fortunately, geologists are not agreed on the exact dates of 
the geological eras. The Encyclopedia Britannica says: “No 
one who has made himself familiar with the actual com¬ 
position of these formations, and the detailed structure of the 
terrestrial crust, can fail to recognize how vague, imperfect and 



76 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


misleading are the data on which such computations are founded.” 

Accordingly we find that Amadeus Grabau in his two- 
volume Geology differs widely from Osborn on the date of 
some of the fossils under review. Thus, Osborn’s dates are: 
Heidelberg, 200,000; Piltdown, 500,000 B. C.; Grabau’s: 
Heidelberg, 360,000; Piltdown, 125,000, B. C. Here is a 
difference of 160,000 years in the case of Heidelberg and of 
375,000 in that o£ Piltdown. Grabau places Trinil in 500,- 
000 B. C., approximately. As Trinil, according to Osborn, is 
older than Piltdown, his period is of course prior to 500,000 
B. C. “It is not impossible that this ape-man [Trinil] is re¬ 
lated to the Neanderthal man.” (Osborn.) If Neanderthal 
flourished 75,000-40,000 B. C., we still have the incredibly 
long period of 450,000 years between Trinil and Neanderthal. 
What credence can be placed in a method which leads to such 
contradictory conclusions? 

Accepting, however, for the sake of comparison, the Osborn 
scheme, we have something like the following: Java, 600,000 
B. C.; Piltdown, 500,000; Heidelberg, 250,000; Neanderthal, 
75,000-40,000; Cro-Magnon, 20,000-16,000. It may be 
added that in an article in Asia, June, 1924, Osborn still 
further complicates the situation by the introduction of a so- 
called Foxhall man, “known only by his instruments and his 
fireplaces,” and placed by Osborn in 600,000 B. C. Was ever 
such playing fast and loose with figures known in all history? 
Dr. Arthur Keith writes: “The evidence in favor of the 
antiquity of this specimen is only presumptive.” Has Osborn 
forgotten his bad “break” in designating the skull of a man 
killed in 1848 as the Talgat living 25,000 B. C. and spuriously 
placing him just before Cro-Magnon? Ab uno disce omnes. 

To complicate matters still further, Professor H. H. Wilder 
(Man's Prehistoric Past) comes forward with the claim that 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


77 


Bruenn II, not mentioned by Osborn, but a type of Homo 
sapiens, flourished in 25,000 B. C. and that a peculiar species 
called Dryopithecus (oak-ape) fashioned eoliths, or worked 
stone implements. But the Encyclopedia Britannica says that 
its supposed relationship to man “is discountenanced by the 
great relative length of the muzzle and the small space for 
the tongue.” Such discrepancies among specialists throw doubt 
on the whole skull argument. 

5. Restorations in the New York Museum 

Since the Osborn-Knight-McGregor classification has been 
widely copied throughout this country, as by the Field Museum, 
Chicago, and in other cities, and is adopted by H. G. Wells, 
Van Loon and Patten and in nearly all text-books on geology 
and biology, it is well to inquire whether even the forced and 
arbitrary manipulation of skulls and bones really supports the 
evolutionistic assumptions. If we proceed from the known to 
the unknown, from modern man to the alleged earliest fossil 
men, we make some interesting discoveries. 

It is allowed on all sides that the men of the late and 
early Stone Age and even of the Old Stone Age (12,000 B. C.) 
were true men. Wherever they originated, whether in Asia, 
Africa or elsewhere, they had a rude and yet a somewhat ad¬ 
vanced civilization, as shown by flint and stone implements, 
carvings and paintings. They had, however, no written lan¬ 
guage; and without a written language and extant written docu¬ 
ments, authentic history is impossible. Prior to this age, all 
is a matter of speculation. When Osborn, Conklin, Patten, 
Coulter and their kind talk of two, three, four, five hundred 
thousand and two or three million years, they convey the im¬ 
pression to unsophisticated minds that everything is recorded 
in black and white and that none but an ignoramus can ques¬ 
tion their jugglery of figures. When we reflect that Accadian, 



78 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


Babylonian, Egyptian records go back at the farthest to about 
6,000 B. C., and that much of what is handed down is capable 
of varied interpretation, we are compelled to consider the 
reckless use of astounding figures by scientists as nothing short 
of outrageous camouflage. But as a matter of fact, it matters 
not how far back we go, even two million years, as is now 
the vogue among some scientists, we find, not ape-men, but 
veritable men, albeit low in culture. 

(a) The Cro-Magnon Man 

Back of the Old Stone Age are the so-called Cro-Magnons 
(20,000 B. C.). The writer of the article “Archaeology” in 
the Encyclopedia Britannica assigns them a high rank: “We 
are dealing with human beings [observe the phrase “human 
beings”] whose intellect, to judge by their physical characters, 
should be on a level with that of the Fuegian or the Austra¬ 
lian black.” The whole hypothesis of the Cro-Magnon man 
and race rests on somewhat slender data: two skulls discovered 
in 1867 at Furfooz, Belgium, three skeletons found in 1868 
in another place, two skeletons discovered in the Grimaldi 
Grotto, Mentone, and two skeletons found in 1914 near Bonn, 
Germany. 

It is obvious that with such slender and disconnected data 
the imagination has free scope in constructing a theory. And 
so we find Professor Osborn saying: “The highly evolved Cro- 
Magnon race entered Europe from the east [how does he know? ] 
and drove out the Neanderthals [hence, as being of a different 
race and lineage, they were not genealogically connected with 
the Neanderthals, and so the continuity is broken]. This was a 
race of warriors, of hunters, of painters and sculptors far su¬ 
perior to any of their predecessors.” (Of. cit. } p. 236.) 

It is difficult to reconcile Osborn’s account of the Neander¬ 
thals and the Cro-Magnons. On page 234 of the work cited 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


79 


the Neanderthal race is said to be “the immediate predecessor 
of modern man.” And yet, as just seen, and as elaborated on 
page 235, “a highly evolved race in no respect inferior to 
modern man entered from the east and drove out or extermi¬ 
nated the Neanderthal race.” How can the Neanderthal race 
be the predecessor of “modern man” if he was exterminated 
or at any rate “driven out”? The only point which we care 
to emphasize here is that both the Neanderthal man and the 
Cro-Magnon man were men and not apes or half-men. This 
takes us back to at least 75,000 B. C., according to evolution¬ 
istic chronology. 

(b) The Neanderthal Man 

The most famous of all the fossil men is the Neanderthal, 
famous because he was the first to be resurrected (1856, West¬ 
phalia, Germany) and because he is regarded as the type from 
which we can judge of men before and after him, despite the 
slurs cast on his character by Osborn and others. Not much of 
him has been resurrected; no flesh, heart, lungs, brain or hair, 
but at most only a thigh-bone, well preserved, some arm-bones, 
fragments of forearm, pelvis, shoulder-blade and a rib. From 
these fragments he has been “reconstructed.” The bones in 
general are not unlike those of a modern man, but the skull 
causes difficulty. It is not exactly like the skull of the average 
man. Dr. Alex Hrdlicka writes: “The forehead is very low 
and also slopes markedly backward; nevertheless it presents a 
moderately defined convexity. The sagittal region is oval from 
side to side, much like that of man today.” (The Most Ancient 
Skeletal Remains of Man.) 

A low forehead is not necessarily proof of inferior mental 
power; else Sir Henry Irving, the actor, and the Marquis La¬ 
fayette, of Revolutionary fame, might be classed as morons. 
Then, too, as to skulls in general there is no absolute standard. 



80 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


In an assembly of 500 men one sees skulls of all shapes and sizes, 
men with small heads and great mental power and men with 
large heads and inferior mental force. Again, how do we know 
that the Neanderthal man was an average man and not lower or 
higher than the average? In fact, doubt exists on all these 
points. 

And yet Neanderthal does not suffer in brain capacity in 
comparison with others. The brain capacity of the Widdas, of 
Ceylon, is 960 centimeters; that of the men of Central Europe, 
1303; of the women, 1,300; that of the average man of today, 
1,240, and Neanderthal, as given by Huxley, 1,230; by 
Schwalbe, 1,234; by Osborn, 1,408. It is difficult to see how 
Osborn makes out that the Neanderthals were inferior to the 
Cro-Magnons. In fact, says Professor Macnamara, “the average 
cranial capacity of selected thirty-six skulls of Australian and 
Tasmanian blacks is even less than that of the Neanderthal 
group.” Where is the evolution? 

(c) The Heidelberg Man 

It is quite a leap from the Neanderthal man of 75,000- 
40,000 B. C. back to the Heidelberg celebrity of 200,000 B. C. 
Osborn writes: “The most ancient fossil relic of man is the 
massive jaw which was found near Heidelberg in deposits of the 
second Interglacial stage. ... A fossil which may be 250,000 
years old. ... It would seem that in the jaw and probably 
in all other characters of the skull, as they become known [how 
can they become known?], the Heidelberg race will be found 
to be a Neanderthal in the making.” (Men of the Old Stone 
Age, p. 100.) Certainly most of this is pure conjecture. 
Hrdlicka remarks: “There can be but little hope that other 
parts of the same skull or skeleton will ever be recovered.” 
(Of. cit ., p. 23.) 

No scientist has been able to supply proof that these frag- 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


81 


ments are of the alleged remote period. Professor Mather in 
the above-mentioned affidavit says: “The jaw resembles that of 
modern man; its sides are nearly parallel; the canine teeth are 
only a little higher than the incisors and molars. But it has 
no chin at all.” One sees on the street every day men with 
little or no chin, and yet they are men, not apes. “Scientists 
classify that creature as a member of the same genus to which 
modern man belongs, but as a different species.” If according 
to Mendelian and Weismann laws there are no new species, 
and if, further, Conklin is correct in saying that “everything 
is produced after its kind,” the distinction between genus and 
species in the case of man is invalid. The creature was man 
or nothing. 

(d) The Piltdown Man 

The so-called Piltdown man is considerable of a puzzle 
for all experts. Professor Osborn writes: “Of great antiquity, 
perhaps 500,000 B. C., are the fragments of a skull discovered 
at Piltdown, England, in conjunction with a number of flint 
and fossil . . . and a jaw which is a matter of controversy.” 
(Page 233.) A crucial question is whether the skull, jaw and 
teeth belong to the same or different creatures. Sir Ray Lank- 
ester holds that the jaw and the skull could not have belonged 
to the same creature. According to the German naturalist 
Schwalbe, “the proper restoration of the Piltdown fragments 
would make them belong, not to any preceding stage of man, 
but to a well-developed, good-sized Homo sapensy the true 
man of to-day.” 

Sifting the immense mass of literature on Mr. Piltdown, 
we reach the conclusion that he was a man and not an ape- 
man. Probably most scientists would agree with Professor Lull: 
“The skull was nicely balanced on the neck, implying an erect 
posture, a rather modern-looking cranium.” Piltdown would, 



82 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


therefore, seem to have been a man, but in a low stage of culture. 
If Professor W. B. Dawkins is correct in assigning him, not to 
the Pliocene age, as is done by some others, but to the Pleisto¬ 
cene, Osborn’s date of 500,000 must be reduced by several 
hundred thousand years. 

(e) The Java or Trinil Man 

We come now to the most talked of celebrity of the skull 
and fossil variety in all history, or rather absence of history, 
the Java or Trinil man, so named after the island of Java and 
the hamlet Trinil, the place of discovery. The extant parts of 
this famous character consist of a small part of a brain-pan, two 
molar teeth and a piece of a thighbone discovered in 1891 and 
described by Dr. Eugene Dubois at a Congress of Zoologists in 
Leyden in 1895. The scattered bones were found fifty feet 
apart. There are no means of knowing whether the two teeth 
belonged to the same jaw, or whether the skull and thighbone are 
those of the same creature. 

The Osborn “reconstruction” is the keystone of the arch 
so carefully constructed by the ape evolutionists. Professor 
Mather writes: “The name ape-man describes him exactly; he 
was intermediate in body structure [how does he know?] be¬ 
tween the apes and man. He lived 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 
years ago.” Osborn is more modest in his date of 500,000. 
Does any man in his senses believe that these few scattered bones, 
lying in a gravel pit near a rushing stream, and subject to fire 
and flood, can be shown to have been preserved even a hundred 
thousand years, much less ten or twenty times that long? 

But Osborn, Wells, Mather are behind the times, for ac¬ 
cording to admissions by Dubois the whole idea that Trinil was 
an ape-man must be abandoned. After a silence of thirty years 
Dubois finally in 1923 allowed scientists to inspect the bones 
in his home at Haarlem, Holland. Dr. A. Hrdlicka writes in 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


83 


the Daily Science News Bulletin: “Pithecanthropus erectus will 
assume an even weightier place in science than it has held up to 
now. None of the 'published illustrations or the casts now in 
various institutions are accurate [including of course the Osborn 
fabrications in New York]. Especially is this true of the teeth 
and thighbone. The new brain-cast is very close to human. 
The femur is without question human. The remains consist 
of the skull-cap, now thoroughly cleansed for the first time, 
the femur, three teeth, two molars and one premolar.” This 
means that the Java man is not the “missing link” and that the 
whole Osborn-Knight-McGregor “reconstructions” are fit only 
for the junk-pile or the gehenna of fire. 

6. Tew Traces of Man's Early Ancestry 

The preceding review of the facts relating to fossil men 
shows clearly that, proceeding from the latest to the earliest 
period, we find that the Stone Age, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, 
Heidelberg, Piltdown and Java men were not “missing links,” 
but real human beings, though at first very low in culture and 
attainments. They were, however, as we shall see presently, on 
an average as highly endowed as the native Australians and 
Tasmanians of today. Evolutionists have accordingly abandoned 
the idea that man sprang from the ape and now claim that both 
man and ape sprang from a common ancestor. There is no proof 
of such an ansector so far as fossils go. This falling back on 
an alleged earlier ancestor is of course an admission that evo¬ 
lutionists have lost their case. Branca, an evolutionist, states 
that the sum total of fragments of anthropoids is a paltry nine. 
There are four kinds known only through a single tooth, one 
kind known only through an upper jaw, one kind through a 
thighbone, one kind by a skull and two through upper and 
lower jaws. 

During the thousands and millions of years of which scien- 



84 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


tists speak so glibly one may reasonably expect to find many ape 
fossils and missing links. Alfred R. Wallace states the case 
fairly: “If there was a common ancestor of all the present 
ape-world and man, why have we the four kinds of anthropoid 
apes and the many kinds of monkeys, all living in the world at 
present, and why have all the representatives of the humanoid 
stem, as it is called, disappeared entirely? What possible cause 
can be assigned for the disappearance of all that did not attain 
to the form and stature of man?” The absurdity of the 
situation is that we are asked to accept as facts mere guesswork 
in order to bolster up a preconceived and arbitrary hypothesis. 

7. No Fossil Afe-Men in America 

While it is certain that Mound-Builders, Bluff-Dwellers 
and other races lived in America much earlier than formerly 
supposed, all efforts to find ape-men in America have proved 
failures. In May, 1922, there appeared in the Journal of the 
American Museum an article by Professor Osborn, announcing 
that a molar tooth found in a Pliocene deposit in Nebraska 
resembled that of the Java man, living 500,000 years ago. He 
accordingly, on the basis of that scrap of evidence, proceeded 
to christen the babe with the high-sounding name Hes'pero - 
pthecus , or Western Ape-Man. Dr. Smith Woodward, of the 
English Museum, burst the bubble by showing in Nature , June 
10, that it was the tooth of a Pliocene “bear.” We have seen 
no notice that Osborn has admitted his unfortunate “break.” 

Other frauds of similar character were the Santa Barbara 
Homo Barberensis , the Los Angeles skulls, the Mississippi man, 
the Cardiff Giant, the Calavaras man and the Lansing man. 
The one creating the greatest excitement in the summer of 1923 
was the Santa Barbara man, which was claimed to be even earlier 
than Trinil, at least 1,000,000 years B. C. It was proved, 
however, by a number of geologists, including Dr. A. S. Stark, 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


85 


of the University of California, Dr. W. S. Kew, of the United 
States Geological Survey, and Dr. R. T. Hill, a retired geologist 
of the Smithsonian Institute, that the “find” belonged to a type 
of real human being living about 5,000 years ago. This case 
is another illustration of the ease with which a gullible public 
may be camouflaged. 

8. Colossal Takes Anent Skulls 

The most colossal hoax of the age is the Osborn-McGregor 
idea that the race, age and mentality of skulls dating from ten 
thousand to a million years ago can be determined absolutely. 
One of the questions discussed at the meeting of the American 
Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, April, 1924, was whether 
the character of the skull has much to do with brain power. 
Dr. F. Boas in an elaborate paper argued that “no scientific 
method has been found of measuring the fundamental capacity 
of different races, as distinct from the mental and moral de¬ 
velopment due to custom, history, economic and social environ¬ 
ment.” See New York Times , April 26, 1924. Dr. A. Golden- 
weiser also presented facts to show that skull size and contour 
prove little as to intelligence. 

The reason is obvious. The science of craniology is in no 
such state that one can determine absolutely the race, period or 
mentality of a skull, and least of all, of such fragment as a 
chin or skull-cap. One sees on the street every day long-headed 
men, short-headed and flat-headed men, men with short chins, 
men with long chins or scarcely any chin at all, men with thick 
skulls, men with high foreheads, men with low foreheads—so 
that no one can determine the intelligence from the skull. Such 
being the case, the Osborn “reconstructions” have little if any 
scientific value in any serious discussion. 

As these lines are being penned there comes to hand a volume 
of the scientist Dr. G. B. O’Toole, professor of animal biology 



86 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


in Seton Hill College, on “The Case against Evolution,” in the 
preface of which we read: “We shall endeavor to show that 
evolution has long since degenerated into a dogma which is 
believed in spite of the facts, and not on account of them.” 
He quotes with approval from a French scientist who says: 
“If one takes his stand upon the exclusive ground of facts, it 
must be acknowledged that the formation of one species from 
another species has not been demonstrated at all.” 

On the subject of “Skulls” O’Toole confirms our own view 
in the following strong language: “Doctor McGregor’s gene¬ 
alogy of man displayed in the American Museum is quite as 
much the fruit of imagination as Jaggar’s Kilauean fantasy” 
(a fiction about one of the Hawaiian Islands). In short, O’Toole 
reaches the conclusion that, spontaneous generation being a myth, 
both life and man must have originated in special creative acts 
of God. 

9. The Andrews Water-Haul in Thibet 

In continuation of what was said above regarding the search 
for “high-brow apes” to be introduced to the bon ton of New 
York, we give a further report of the Andrews expedition to 
Thibet and the sum total of discoveries. From the full account 
in the New York Times , November 11, 1925, we learn that Mr. 
Andrews returned “with forty new dinosaur eggs, the skulls of 
six new types of mammals which lived contemporaneously with 
the dinosaurs and the tools of ancient stone age people that 
once lived in the heart of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.” Primi¬ 
tive flint instruments “of early human beings were discovered 
near the very center of the Gobi Desert, near the place where 
the Dinosaur eggs were discovered three years ago. . . . The 
primitive mammals, whose skulls were found, varied from the 
size of a mouse to that of a rat. . . . These six skulls are of 
prime scientific interest and importance, and alone justify the 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


87 


cost of the expedition. . . . Other interesting fossils belonged 
to several great families of animals which had been represented 
only by specimens found in America.” 

All this and very much more that we cannot reproduce is 
exceedingly interesting. But we read: “The expedition has 
failed so far to obtain evidence that the forerunners of human 
beings dwelt on the Gobi Desert, but it has succeeded in pro¬ 
ducing the first proof of man’s existence in the Gobi Desert at 
a fairly early period. The earliest human relics which were 
found were tools belonging to a race which lived there some 
50,000 to 100,000 years ago. They were represented by crude 
stone scrapers of the Mousterian type which are associated with 
a primitive type of human like the Neanderthal man.” In the 
more advanced stone age were found “thousands of flint chips, 
scrapers, drills, hammers and old fireplaces. And at a still higher 
level finely worked spear-scrapers, steel arrows and spear-points 
and some crude handmade pottery.” 

These “finds” show that a somewhat advanced culture existed 
in the Gobi Desert thousands of years ago. But, so far as the 
report goes, it was a civilization of human beings and not of 
apes or semi-apes, or “high-brow apes.” Since the real purpose 
of the expedition when it set out four years ago was to convince 
the world that a true ape-man existed, the net result so far as 
a “missing link” is concerned is a great disappointment, a water- 
haul in short. They seem to have found about everything else 
but what they were looking for, and so must have returned 
with no little chagrin. 

E. The Question of the Soul 

To get at the bottom of the many ramifications of the 
doctrine of evolution one must have a clear idea of what is 
involved in its world-view, both of nature and of man. Is there 
a soul as some kind of entity or existence, or has man merely 



88 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


an animal existence? If he is more than an animal, how did 
he become so? If he is a responsible agent, how and when 
did he become so? Does he die like an animal, or is he in 
some sense immortal? 

1. What Is the Soul? 

In modern usage the word soul has several well-defined 
meanings. First, it denotes a substantial entity capable of 
existing by itself and apart from the body, the undying part 
of man; then a human being, as in Shakespeare, “My lord, this 
is a poor, mad soul”; finally, disembodied spirit, as when Milton 
says: “Every soul in heaven shall bow the knee.” The Latin 
is the only language which has two words to express the two 
fundamental meanings of the Hebrew nefhesh and the New 
Testament pyche y namely, anima y the animal life in animals 
and man, and animus , the rational element. Man is what he 
is by virtue of his soul. He has a body, a spirit, various dis¬ 
positions, but these arise out of the nature of the soul. 

2. Man a Living Soul 

All this is brought out more fully in Genesis 2:7: “Jehovah 
God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed 
into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living 
soul.” This is a graphic way of saying that man consists of a 
dual nature, material and spiritual. Man combines in himself 
the lower and the higher; he is the connecting link between 
two worlds, the earthly and the heavenly. He may degrade 
himself to an animal or he may become an angel of light. 

The method of man’s creation is not disclosed. Whether 
the body be an immediate or mediate creation is a question 
of minor importance, so long as we hold that our heritage is 
from God. The bodily organism may, like that of the beast, 
have been produced from the existent elements, but the com¬ 
plex being man was now called into existence as a new creation. 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


89 


We do not adopt the view of some that God endowed an ape 
or chimpanzee with a human soul and spirit and so made a 
person out of it, but we hold that the soul-spirit of Genesis 2:7 
and the image of God, 1:27, imply a direct creation de novo. 
Therefore the animal, as impersonal, will not live hereafter. It 
is useful to man here, but is not essential to spirit-life in the 
next world. 

3. A dualism t or the Soul Merely a Series of Experiences 

In every age, and especially the more recent, there have 
been schools of thought which, like the materialistic, have taught 
that the soul is a mere secretion of the brain, or, like the As- 
sociationists, have held that what is called the soul has no 
existence, but is a mere stream of consciousness. Psychologists 
may be classified in various ways, but for our purpose they 
fall into one or the other of two groups: Actualism or Phenomen¬ 
alism on the one hand, and Substantialism or Spiritualism on 
the other. According to the former there is no such thing as 
the soul; what is called the soul is merely a stream or suc¬ 
cession of states more or less conscious. Under this view it is 
idle to speak of the existence of the soul after death, since 
man dies like the animal. This view is widely entertained 
in scientific circles. 

4. Arguments of Actualists 

The chief arguments of actualists are: I. We know merely 
states of consciousness, and these do not prove the existence 
of the soul. There is at most but a force or energy of some 
kind back of the successive states. Some of the adherents 
of this view discard the word soul and employ such terms as 
force or energy. They make psychology a branch of biology, 
and that of physiology, and that of physics. 2. Consciousness 
is merely a stream of passing events, with no abiding self under- 



90 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


neath. 3. The soul has no existence apart from the body and 
is in fact at bottom the result of matter-force. This is the 
view underlying false evolutionism, pragmatism, bahaviorism, 
the functional psychology and much of current science. We 
turn now to the alternative view. 

5. Substantialism , or Spiritualism 

The old, traditional view is that of substantialism, or spiritu¬ 
alism, known also as personal idealism, according to which the 
person is an abiding self, essentially, though not empirically, 
the same from day to day. The chief arguments are: 1. Self¬ 
observation on consciousness reveals three fundamental facts, 
namely, a multitude of ideas which come and go, the unity of 
consciousness, and the union of the successive states into the 
oneness of self-consciousness in the form of a single unchange¬ 
able self or I. The essence or entity of a thing ever endures, 
even though the states change. The oak is the acorn in a 
different form. 2. Our self presents itself to us as one and 
indivisible amidst all the changes of the soul states, which is 
not possible under the other view. Thus I remember that on 
a certain day in the summer of 1885 I was in the Pantheon, 
Paris, attending the funeral of Victor Hugo. It requires 
something static to record flowing events. 3. The true ground 
for the doctrine of soul-substance is the unity of consciousness; 
it is a fact that we unite simultaneous psychical conditions into 
the strictest unity and that we relate our ideas of years past 
to one and the same spiritual center, the soul. 

6. A dualism in Modern Times 

Such are the arguments for the two views. Each school 
has able defenders. In recent years actualism has been defended 
by Herbert Spencer, Cornelius the pragmatist, and William 
James. The foundation of the theory was laid by Spinoza, 
who taught that mind and matter are parallel manifestations 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


91 


of a deeper reality and that consciousness and ideas do not 
imply a soul. Hobbes, Hume, the two Mills and Spencer 
boldly developed the theory and exalted ideas and consciousness 
to the rank of entities. They conceived of ideas as not needing 
a thinker. Actualists or phenomenalists differ widely among 
themselves, there being on the one hand such avowed mate¬ 
rialists as Karl Vogt, Louis Buechner and J. Moleschott, and on 
the other such authorities as Wundt, Muensterberg and James, 
who, however, at times lay down principles which really favor 
substantialism or personal idealism. 

According to Wundt, the soul, though no substance, but a 
logical physiological unity, is implied in mental processes. He 
allows that the term soul so thoroughly permeates psychology 
and is after all so useful that it may be retained. Muensterberg 
holds that there is no psychic substance; nevertheless the soul 
is in a sense abiding because its reality in temporal efficiency 
is not influenced by the object phenomena in time. Hoeffding, 
the great Danish psychologist, says that we must distinguish 
between the soul in the narrow sense of animal life and in 
that of mind or consciousness. 

Some American psychologists scarcely ever get beyond the 
-dictum that the soul is merely a vital force, not essentially 
different from that of the animal, but only more “evolved.” 

7. Professor William James on the Soul 

The late Professor William James of Harvard, a psycholo¬ 
gist of international repute, built up an American school of 
psychology. It is a source of regret that his discussion of the 
nature of the soul or self in both his larger and smaller Psy¬ 
chology is exceedingly unsatisfactory. He cogently states the 
arguments for spiritualism—so forcibly, indeed, that he might 
be supposed to accept the logical conclusion; but he finally 
declares that the term soul expresses nothing and guarantees 



92 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


nothing. He writes: “I feel entirely free to discard the word 
soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will be in 
the vaguest and most popular way.” (Principles of Psy ., I, 
p. 350.) James, as Hoeffding says, teaches a psychology without 
the psyche or soul, as do most of his followers. James adopts 
the old view of the Associationists that the soul is only a 
stream of consciousness, or of thought, saying that thought 
itself is the only verifiable thinker. He does not explain how 
there can be thought without a thinker. 

James is refuted by his admission that the spiritualist doc¬ 
trine of the soul is the only means of escape from the un¬ 
tenable mind-stuff hypothesis and materialism. He writes: 
“The principle of individuality within us must be substantial, 
for psychic phenomena are activities, and there can be no 
activity without a conscious agent. This substantial agent can¬ 
not be the brain, but must be something immaterial; for its 
activity, thought, is both immaterial and takes cognizance of 
immaterial things, and of material things in general.” (Op. cit. y 
p. 343.) This implies the weakness of actualism. 

8. Substantialism in Modern Times 

In modern times the theory that the soul is a real and 
substantial subsistence has prevailed so largely that it reflects 
the position of the leading philosophers and psychologists. 
Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Trendelenburg, Lotze, Ulrizi, 
Bradley, Stout, J. M. Baldwin, Royce, Ormond, Hyslop, etc., 
are substantialists, though differing on minor points. These 
men, whether idealists or realists, entertain a high view of 
the soul and so are logically driven to the doctrine that the 
soul is an abiding entity, or personality; otherwise it would 
be a contradiction to speak of mental activity. As Hoeffding 
says, Plato was the founder, Descartes the rediscoverer and 
Lotze the most distinguished modern champion of substantialism. 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


93 


Lotze argues that the soul must be viewed as a spiritually- 
substantive entity, capable of thought and action, not as a hard, 
impenetrable atom, but as a person with all this term implies, 
as self-consciousness and self-determination. Both he and Ulrizi 
hold that the soul is an undivided, immaterial substance whose 
characteristic is the power of controlling mind and body. 

9. Responsibility and Immortality 

Two considerations weigh heavily in favor of the substan- 
tialistic view: human responsibility and immortality. How 
can a man be held responsible here and hereafter if the soul 
is a mere succession of experiences, a stream of ideas, a mere 
vapor? Professor James felt the force of this when he wrote: 
“The mere stream of consciousness, with its lapses of memory, 
cannot possibly be as responsible as a soul which is at the judg¬ 
ment day all that it ever was.” 

Again, how can we speak of immortality in any sense if 
the soul be a mere bundle of ideas and sensations? Here 
again James states the issue squarely: “For immortality the 
simplicity and substantiality of the soul seem to offer a solid 
guaranty. A stream of thought, for aught that we see to be 
contained in its essence, may come to a full stop at any moment; 
but a simple substance is incorruptible and will, by its inertia, 
persist in being so long as the Creator does not by a direct 
miracle snuff it out. Unquestionably this is the stronghold 
of the spiritualistic belief—as indeed the popular touchstone 
for all philosophies is the question, What is their bearing on 
a future life?” ( Principles , I, 348.) 

10. The Seat of the Soul 

The question is sometimes asked, In what part of the body 
is the soul? This is a meaningless query, for the soul as an 
immaterial entity has no location. Like a mathematial point, it 



94 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


has position but not magnitude. Nevertheless we may ask, 
Where especially is it most active dynamically? I am men¬ 
tally present in the British Museum when I see a picture of 
it, but I am not bodily or dynamically present there, that is, 
I work no effects. If by the seat of the soul we mean only 
the place where it is most dynamically present, that center is 
somewhere in the cortex of the brain. Descartes placed this 
in the pineal gland, a conical organ in the posterior part of 
the cerebrum. Lotze and Volckmann adopt a similar view. 

That the dynamic seat of the soul is somewhere in the 
brain was shown by Dr. W. H. Thompson, physician to the 
Roosevelt hospital in New York, in his “Brain and Personality.” 
It is well known that the brain has two lobes or hemispheres, 
on the right and left sides respectively. A strange fact is 
that in a right-handed person the faculty of speech is located 
in the left hemisphere. If this hemisphere be impaired late 
in life, the speech faculty can only with difficulty be developed 
on the right side. This shows that the mind quality is not 
in the brain as such and that the gift of speech is not due 
to any original or special fitness of the left hemisphere, but 
simply because it was the hemisphere related to the hand most 
used in childhood. Thompson concludes that the theory that 
the brain makes the mind is false and that it is rather the 
mind that makes the brain. 

Thompson even goes so far as to maintain that we can 
make our own brains, so far as special mental functions are 
concerned, if only we have wills strong enough to take the 
trouble. By practice, practice, practice, as in Helen Keller’s 
case, the will stimulus will not only organize brain centers, 
but will project new connecting, or, as they are technically 
called, association fibers, which will make nerve centers work 
together as they could not without being thus associated. 




Evolution in a Nutshell 


95 


11. Soul Survival according to Thompson 
Thompson has no hesitancy in affirming that man’s per¬ 
sonality is capable of such infinite development that to suppose 
the soul will cease to exist at death is contrary to all analogy. 
“The mental and moral equipment of man seem sufficient for 
any future life, however limitless its conditions. . . . We can 
now conceive of a body no longer made of the most tem¬ 
porary forms of that matter which is itself passing away, but 
fashioned to be a dynamic body, a body of power which need 
not shrink, as here, from the heavy burden of the will.” The 
Hereafter follows too closely upon the Here to suppose that 
there is no connection between them. 

In a later work, “Life, Death and Immortality,” this famous 
physician goes more thoroughly into the subject, saying: “In 
every other animal its physical development explains every¬ 
thing, but nothing physical explains man. . . . Besides being 
an animal, man is a person, which no other earthly creature is. 
Personality is the greatest fact in the universe [that is, the 
physical universe], of which a holy God is the source, and man 
has all the attributes of personality.” 

Such is the testimony of a scientist who examines such 
matters by the hard and fast methods of critical investigation. 
Our conclusion is that Scripture, contemporaneous psychology 
and physiology prove without a doubt that man is a being 
made in God’s image and endowed with an enduring personality. 

12. Scientists Evade the Question of the Soul 
In his affidavit at the Scopes trial Professor Mather says: 
“It is the business of the theologian, not the scientist, to state 
just when and how man gained a soul. . . . Men of science 
have as their aim the discovery of facts.” Professor Vernon 
Kellogg takes a similar position, saying: “Evolution concerns 
man as a link in the chain of animate matter. It does not con- 



96 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


cern him as a repository of spirit, soul and religious yearning.” 
(The World's Work , May, 1924.) Not only men of science, 
but men generally, aim at “the discovery of facts.” The 
question here is, Is the soul a fact or a fiction? 

Is not man to be regarded as ultimately a unit? Can we 
divide him up into body and soul, neither having any relation 
to the other? What is “animate matter”? Is it not matter 
with an anima , a life principle, expressed by the Hebrew 
ne'phesh in the Old Testament, according to which the animal 
and man have alike the life principle, but man alone the animus , 
or mind, intelligence, reason, personality? 

Mather writes: “It is man’s soul, his spirit, which is pat¬ 
terned after God, the Spirit.” This is correct. It is a fact, 
but with what consistency can Mather state this psychological 
fact and in the next paragraph argue that it is not the business 
of the scientist to inquire into the origin of the soul? He 
certainly does not hold that soul and body are distinct entities. 

Kellogg writes: “How these [spirit, soul, etc.] came to be 
in him, the evolutionist does not know.” This is the weakest 
and most unfortunate statement in this unfortunate article. 
Do not evolutionists as a class regard man, body, soul, spirit, 
as descended from an animal, an amoeba? How man acquired 
a soul or spirit is in truth more vital for the scientist than for 
the theologian. The latter, with his doctrine of man created 
in the image of God, has a consistent and intelligible view 
and solves the problem; the former either cuts up man into 
body and soul, or makes the soul a product of matter (a kind of 
e / pi'phenomenon of nerve force), or dismisses the subject with 
a curt “I do not know.” He ought to know, or confess failure 
regarding the complete nature of man as man. 

Evolution, says Kellogg, does “not concern man” in his 
“religious yearning and faith.” On the contrary evolution 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


97 


concerns man most vitally and profoundly on the side of re¬ 
ligion. If man came from the animal, when did he reach 
the state of responsibility in the sight of man and of God? 
Was it the Java, the Piltdown, the Heidelberg, the Neander¬ 
thal, the Cro-Magnon or the Stone Age man, or some other, 
who first became a responsible agent? Apes are not responsible 
agents; nor any other animal. If man is merely a high-grade 
animal, why hold him accountable for his acts? 

The fact that science makes a terrible witches’ broth of 
the whole matter is proof of some radical defect of the evolu¬ 
tionistic scheme, 



CHAPTER V. 


Is the Doctrine of Evolution a Satisfactory and Com¬ 
prehensive World-View? ( Continued ) 

I T is a principle of science and logic that, of various the¬ 
ories offered in explanation of anything, that one is to be 
preferred which covers all the facts or the greatest number of 
facts. The preceding pages contain proof that if the term 
evolution be understood in the old and legitimate sense of a 
development of the genus, type or species, or, in short, of its 
kind, there can be no objection, for such evolution is a well- 
attested fact. It is not a fact, however, that “cosmic evolution 
and organic evolution, . . . the growth of plant and man, 
... are continuous parts of one process.” (Patten.) Neither 
Patten nor any one else has ever shown that the three spheres 
of matter-force, life and mind are an evolution. On the con¬ 
trary, the evidence from all sides is overwhelming that they 
are creations by the Infinite. It follows that not evolution, but 
creation as revealed in broad outline in the first two chapters 
of Genesis, covers by all odds the greatest number of facts, 
and so is the most satisfactory and comprehensive of all world¬ 
views. 


1. The Tzvo World-Views 

Whatever views one may entertain of matter, life, mind, 
development and evolution, all are reducible to two funda¬ 
mental world-views. Professor N. K. Smith, in his inaugural 
address in the chair of philosophy in Edinburgh University, 
writes: “Ultimately there are only two philosophies, the ideal¬ 
istic and the naturalistic; it is between these two forms that 
we are called upon to decide.” If by “idealistic” we under¬ 
stand “personal idealism,” we have on the one side God, the 
Creator, and man, a rational and responsible self, free will 

98 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


99 


and immortality; on the other no God (for the God of pan¬ 
theism, theosophy, New Thought and similar systems is iden¬ 
tified with the cosmic process and has no distinct personality), 
no human personality, free will or a hereafter, but at most 
only force, energy and determinism. Professor G. T. Ladd, 
of Yale, in an article on “Modern Theism” shows that all 
theories of the universe are reducible to two, the theistic and 
the mechanistic, the former personal, the latter impersonal. 
“Science cannot offer the slightest satisfactory rational explana¬ 
tion of a material universe, or of a history of humanity, that 
has no personal ground, whose Being reflective thought ex¬ 
plores, and in whom religious faith believes, worships and 
obeys as God. In fact no mechanical theory wholly explains 
the reality of the most insignificant thing.” ( Methodist Quar. 
Review , July, 1919.) 

(a) The Mechanistic or "Naturalistic World-View 

It was pointed out above in the section on Matter-Force 
that one group of evolutionists, headed by Haeckel and cham¬ 
pioned by Darrow, unflinchingly adopt a mechanistic, natural¬ 
istic world-view and conceive of everything in the world as 
the result of an infinite and eternal force or energy. Unless 
the reader grasps the scope of this view he will be unable to 
understand the real import of the doctrine of evolution as 
held by many of its exponents. Such a view does not neces¬ 
sarily deny a personal First Cause, provided the physical uni¬ 
verse be regarded as having a beginning in time. Haeckel, 
however, denied outright the existence of God. 

It is impossible to determine what proportion of scientists 
believe in the existence of a personal God. Professor James 
H. Leuba, in collecting material for his Belief in God and 
Immortality , inferred from answers to a questionnaire that only 
about twenty-five per cent believe in a God who answers prayer, 



100 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


or specifically: psychologists, 14 per cent; biologists, 16; soci¬ 
ologists, 18; historians, 32; physical-scientists, 35. A careful 
examination of the system of thought in which Patten, Cramp- 
ton, C. W. Eliot and such men move indicates that, being 
committed to the idea of one universal force or energy and 
the invariability of natural law, they regard the universe as 
existing from eternity. Crampton, as seen above, says plumply 
that natural laws, without a divine lawgiver and without super¬ 
natural creation, produced the world and all therein. 

This is the old naturalism, which, according to the Century 
Dictionary, is the “scientific view of the world, and especially 
of man and human history and society, which takes account 
only of natural (as distinguished from supernatural) elements 
and forces.” 

T. B. Wiggin, in characterizing the new evolutionism, says: 
“Man is found to be a brother not only to the brute, but to 
the clod and crystal. . . . Life itself is believed to be a mere 
phenomenon of matter. . . . Indeed matter itself has disap¬ 
peared and the mechanist finds nothing but force, a world of 
electrical points which by their infinite permutations and com¬ 
binations produce that transitory illusion which we call life.” 
(The New Decalogue of Science.') In short, says Wiggin, God, 
heaven, immortality are “practically eliminated from modern 
scientific thinking and critical philosophy.” 

John Burroughs says: “There is no other adequate solution 
of the total problem of life and nature than what is called 
pantheism, which identifies matter and mind, finite and infinite. 

. . . Shall we endow the Eternal with personality? Into 
what absurdities this leads us.” (Accepting the Universe.) 

(b) The Theistic World-View 

Over against the mechanistic, impersonalistic world-view, 
there looms up the doctrine of personalism, or the theory that 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


101 


a being, known in religion as God and in philosophy as the 
Absolute, in infinite wisdom and love created the realms of 
matter-force, life and man, to the end that man in loving and 
worshiping God might attain his highest happiness here and 
hereafter. The group of scientists (Conklin, Coulter, Milli¬ 
kan, Mather) who grant that there is a God are in an awk¬ 
ward dilemma. Either they must allow that God created the 
three realms in a “special” act, and continues to preserve and 
guide them to a definite end, or they must hold that He did 
nothing but create matter-force, and now leaves the world to 
its fate as the old deists held. The former alternative over¬ 
turns the doctrine of evolution, the latter that of providence. 
In fact we search the so-called theistic evolutionists in vain 
for a clear statement of God’s share in creating the universe. 
They constantly affirm that evolution “creates,” but rarely, if 
ever, that God creates. 

Least of all do they ever refer to any possible aim of God 
in the creation. As a matter of fact, there is no world-aim in 
evolution. All is a ceaseless movement with no definite pur¬ 
pose. Evolutionists, like pragmatists, can say: “We do not 
know where we are going, but we are on the way.” 

(^) Preservation and Providence in Relation to Evolution 

The Christian doctrine of providence is substantially that 
God maintains in existence the things and persons that He 
has created. It is not creation, but implies creation. According 
to deism and the doctrine of evolution God withdrew from 
the universe as soon as He had created it—an impossible view. 

Closely related to preservation is the doctrine of prov¬ 
idence, according to which God exercises a continuous agency to 
the end that events in the physical and moral world may con¬ 
tribute to the purpose of the creation. Those who hold that 
God never intervenes in human history by miracle or super- 



102 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


natural acts, but has bound himself through all eternity to 
natural laws of his own ordaining, virtually make him the 
slave of his own laws, instead of conceiving him as higher 
than his laws. As men, endowed with personality and freedom 
of action, form stupendous plans and execute them, so, in a 
vastly higher degree, God must be supposed to carry out his 
plans through control of his laws and the free agency of men. 
Unfortunately, evolution, as understood today, makes no pro¬ 
vision for such divine oversight and control and never gets 
beyond the dead level of natural law. 

* 2. Theistic Evolution 

How much of what takes place in nature is due to an 
original creation? How much to evolution? Which is the 
greater half? Science rejects the Genesis cosmogony, but prac¬ 
tically offers nothing in its stead. It rarely uses the term crea¬ 
tion by a Creator, but always evolution from evolution in an 
eternal regress. The climax of absurdity is reached in the 
assertion that “evolution” is creation. Professor Mather at the 
Scopes trial wrote: “The theories of theistic evolution held by 
millions of scientifically tiained Christian men and women lead 
inevitably to a better knowledge of God and a firmer faith in 
His effective presence in the world.” Neither Mather nor 
any one else explains what theistic evolution is. 

Mather’s statement that “God is a power, a force; He 
necessarily uses processes and methods in displaying His power 
and exerting force,” is correct enough as far as it goes, barring 
the infelicitous expression “displaying His power,” as if for¬ 
sooth God’s purpose were primarily to “display His power,” 
rather than to conduct earthly and human history to its des¬ 
tined goal. May not creation on a large scale be one of “the 
processes and methods” of God? 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


103 


Theistic evolutionists the world over constantly speak of 
“creation by evolution” and “evolution as God’s method of 
creation.” Did matter come from evolution? Or life? Or 
personality? Before there can be evolution there must be 
creation, as every theist must grant. Before life can evolve 
there must be life. Evolutionists speak lightly of divine crea¬ 
tion. Vernon Kellogg says: “Granted life, granted matter, . . . 
granted an ultimate cause or causes, and evolution follows.” 
(The World's Work, May, 1924.) Whence such matter, energy 
and life? Kellogg does not attempt to explain and ought to 
have recalled Kant’s profound observation that one cannot know 
how a caterpillar originated without knowing how the universe 
originated. Without an explanation of origins evolution fails 
as a-satisfactory world-view over against Biblical creationism. 

The phrase “theistic evolution” has a plausible look, for 
it implies that God has a part in the evolutionary process. 
In reality, however, it is deceptive, for the greater half, indeed 
nine-tenths, is evolution, the one-tenth God. The thorough¬ 
going evolutionist finds it convenient not to refer to God 
except as a figurehead with little or nothing to do. Evolution 
cannot be its own cause, much less of the universe. Conklin, 
Coulter, Mather and so-called theistic evolutionists gingerly 
allow God to be a cause, but immediately proceed to personify 
evolution (which is not an entity, but merely a process) and 
ascribe to it the creation of atoms, stars, suns, matter, force, 
life, and even man. Conklin writes: “Everything that has 
been thoroughly investigated has been found to be natural 
[obviously to the exclusion of a supernatural].” ( Direction, etc., 
p. 195.) J. M. Coulter says: “It is all the result of the 
activities of that all-pervading energy which we have learned 
to call God.” {Where Evolution and Religion Meet, p. 101.) 

Though theistic evolutionists of a generation ago allowed 



104 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


that God may have created plant and animal life, and possibly 
man, none in recent times seem to be disposed to grant to 
God any such prerogative, man being, not a creation, but an 
“evolution” of an amoeba. 

It is clear that the widely advertised slogan “theistic evolu¬ 
tion” is a vague, colorless expression explaining nothing and 
liable to run out into a pantheistic identification of God and 
the universe, or a deistic estrangement of God from the uni¬ 
verse. The only view that meets the conditions of the case 
is that of a divine creation substantially as recorded in the first 
two chapters of Genesis. 

(a) Miracle of Origin of Motion 
According to the scientific hypothesis of the origin of the 
universe (whether that of Laplace or of Chamberlin is im¬ 
material), matter which previously was a tenuous vapor was 
set in motion and produced suns, stars and worlds. How did it 
start? Not of itself, for that violates the law of inertia. It 
must have gotten motion from some outside source, say God. 
The objection that the universe, as a machine, was always in 
motion, is invalid, for this would be a case of perpetual motion, 
an impossibility. The origin of motion, therefore, was not a 
creation by evolution, or a theistic evolution, or evolution in any 
sense. Here, again, the assumed law of continuity fails. 

(b) Divine Intervention and Theistic Evolution 
The more conservative theistic evolutionists grant that God 
directs the course of nature and of human history. But this 
implies intervention and the entrance of a higher law than 
that of nature. He who allows that God created the universe, 
force, animal and human life, is no longer a theistic evolu¬ 
tionist, but a theistic creationist. Still more so, if he allows 
that the advent and resurrection of Christ were unique and 
extraordinary events. 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


105 


At the Scopes trial the representatives of evolution aimed 
to present every aspect of the case in the strongest possible 
light. While Clarence Darrow, an avowed agnostic and prac¬ 
tically an atheist, denied divine creation, Professor Mather 
allowed that God created man in His image, though science 
“may never know how God breathed a living soul into a man’s 
body.” This is well said, for creation is an inscrutable mys¬ 
tery hidden from a finite mind. It would be interesting to 
know how Mather reconciles man’s creation in the divine image 
with his evolutionistic view that man is a descendant of an 
animal. The two views are irreconcilable. 

3. The Problem of Freedom of the Will 

According to the old psychology generally accepted before 
the rise of the dogma of evolution, man is a self-determining 
agent with the liberty of choice. It was of course allowed 
that the country of his birth, the color of his hair, his stature, 
sex and mental endowment were determined by circumstances 
over which he had no control. But these factors do not prevent 
his freedom of action in the affairs of life. He is, accordingly, 
both in law and ethics, regarded as responsible for his acts. 

But the assumed all-inclusive law of evolution has changed 
all this. Science tells us that everything in the universe, down 
to the minutest detail, takes place according to inflexible natur¬ 
al law. Not even God changes such law. If such law were 
limited to the stellar universe, it would not concern us directly. 
But it has a wider sweep. The same rigid law, it is said, 
applies to man. Man is merely a part of nature and subject 
to its laws. He is, in fact, affirms a professor of Columbia 
University (Edman), an “accident,” thrown on the cosmic sea 
as driftwood. How, then, can he exercise freedom of choice? 
He cannot, says the up-to-the-minute evolutionist. He imag- 




106 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


ines that he is free, but he labors under a delusion without 
knowing it. 

Since, however, the common sense of mankind rebels against 
any such outrageous doctrine, science attempts to explain. 

(a) No Free Will According to Science 

That under scientific premises there can be no free will is 
admitted by thoughtful scientists. Delage and Goldsmith, 
French scientists, say: “What becomes, in fact, if one accepts 
the new point of view (evolution), of the idea of free will, 
the indispensable basis of every ethical system? Where could we 
find any guidance for human behavior if we gave up the spiritu¬ 
alistic faith? . . . The same applies to social science, to history, 
to political economy and to practical questions related to them. ,> 
(Les Theories de VEvolution , pp. 6, 7.) 

Scientists, including Osborn, Conklin, Millikan, Coulter, 
Patten and Mather, do not attempt to explain how, when and 
where man acquired free will and became a responsible agent. 
Whether the Java, Heidelberg, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon or 
some later man broke away from nature’s inviolable (?) law and 
knocked the underpinning out of the evolutionistic scheme, we 
are not told. 

Some of the younger and bolder evolutionists, seeing their 
dilemma and unwilling to accept the common-sense view, do 
not shrink from following the arbitrary premise to its logical 
conclusion and accept a rank determinism. Thus Professor A. 
B. Wolfe, of the Ohio State University, in a book recently 
published, announces his viewpoint as “the assumption of a 
consistent, mechanistic, deterministic view of nature, man and 
his social relations included. ... I have been driven to this 
postulate because it seems to be the only one in accord with 
relational experience, and the only one which affords a sure 
basis of understanding of phenomena, both natural and social. 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


107 


[is Wolfe a Marxian socialist?] Consistent with this deter¬ 
ministic position goes adherence to the behavioristic psychology 
which gives promise of consistent scientific quality.” 

Wolfe sees that there is only one alternative: either he 
must allow that man is a free, self-determining agent and thus 
overturn the evolutionistic postulate of invariability, or swallow 
the whole evolutionistic mishmash. We give him credit for 
thus unflinchingly stating his real views, instead of concealing 
them, as do many high-school and college professors. 

Wolfe is candid also in accepting the behavioristic psy¬ 
chology, which, as says J. B. Watson of Johns Hopkins Uni¬ 
versity, in his book on the subject, has no reference to con¬ 
sciousness, perception image, or will. “I have written,” says 
Watson, “with the human animal [probably an ass] in front 
of me.” The idea is that the behavior of a Newton in his 
profound mathematical investigations is of the same order as 
that of a dog circling around before lying down. No wonder 
that the popular name for such stuff is dog-behavior or muscle- 
twitch psychology. 

(b) The True View of the Will 

It is clear that the will, or, more correctly, man putting 
forth his will, is not under the law of physical and mechanical 
causation. The will is the soul’s power to choose between 
motives and to initiate means to attain a desired end. Professor 
John Dewey writes: “The man determines himself by setting up 
either good or evil as a motive to himself.” James Seth, in the 
classical work “Freedom of Ethical Postulates,” says: “We con¬ 
tend for a power of free initiation in the self, and this it is 
necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.” 

In short, without will to select and combine the material 
at command we could have no science, art, morality or religion. 



108 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


4. Summary of Results 

We sum up briefly the results of the discussion. From 
the nature of the case, the question of evolution covers a 
tremendously wide field and affects every phase of life and 
thought. It cannot, as some people vainly imagine, be settled 
offhand. As a matter of fact, however, the field is narrowed 
to some half dozen sciences, as geology, biology, chemistry, 
physics, astronomy and psychology. The strongest proof is sup¬ 
posed to come from geology, and yet the “gaps” and “breaks” 
are so numerous that eminent physicists doubt the correctness 
of the current classification. More writes: “From these few 
and wholly inadequate facts, the history of the world, from 
the time when it was a molten and fiery mass to the present, 
is given to us by geologists and biologists. ... If the pedigree 
of paleontological organisms is thus a matter of guess-work, 
what can be said of the certainty of the theories as to the 
causes of the changes from one species to another?” (The Dogma 
of Evolution , pp. 15, 19.) 

(a) The Millions of Years of Geology 

We read daily of the millions of years of the strata of 
the earth’s surface and of the millions of years ago of such 
and such animals and even man. Americans are accustomed to 
“big figures,” and so scientists whet the public appetite by 
speaking of millions instead of thousands. Geologists have 
hoodwinked the public. The fact is that we can estimate the 
thickness and age of the earth’s crust only by our ability to 
arrange the strata of rocks in their actual order and measuring 
the thickness. Such estimates, says a noted scientist, “amount 
to mere guessing.” The eminent geologist Sir Archibald 
Geikie writes. “The few centuries wherein man has been ob¬ 
serving nature obviously form much too brief an interval by 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


109 


which to measure the intensity of geological action in all past 
time.” L. T. More, after a long discussion, sums up thus: 
“We can then be certain that geology cannot, and never will 
be able to, translate the thickness of any stratum into an equiv¬ 
alent length of time, and that it cannot, and never will be 
able to, establish real contemporaneousness of time in different 
parts of the world.” {Of. cit., p. 151.) The situation war¬ 
rants this strong language. 

(b) Gafs in the Geological Eras 

In our section on geology overwhelming proof was offered 
that the law of continuity is repeatedly broken. There are 
numerous unexplained gaps and breaks. Species disappear and 
new ones take their place. Thus, of the 10,000 species of 
animals at the beginning of the Carboniferous period, there 
were only 300 at the close. There is, accordingly, a great gap 
between the Carboniferous period and the Triassic. Likewise 
between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, higher forms of life 
being in an unaccountable way succeeded by minute chalk 
formations, so that one instinctively asks, Where is the evolu¬ 
tion? 

Another, if not greater, break occurs at the close of the 
Cretaceous period, during which there was an abundance of 
marsupial animals, but few placentals, whereas at the beginning 
of the Eocene period, in place of the chalk formations, there 
arose, say Chamberlin and Salisbury, the Age of Mammals, in 
fact placental mammals. “Geologists still ask, whence came 
the recent placental mammals, and their answer is: their origin 
is one of the great outstanding froblems in faleontology. . . . 
The more one studies paleontology, the more certain one becomes 
that evolution is based on faith alone; exactly the same sort of 
faith which it is necessary to have when one encounters the 
great mysteries of religion.” (More, of. cit., p. 160.) 



110 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


( c ) In What Sense Evolution Is True 

The keynote of this book, being that the three realms of 
matter-force, life and mind are distinct, is being verified every 
day. Professor J. A. Thomson, in his “Introduction to Science,” 
accepts the threefold division: (1) The sphere of matter, the 
inorganic world, where mechanism reigns; (2) the vital order, 
of life, where mechanism fails; (3) the psychical order, the 
world of mind, where neither mechanism nor vitalism suffices. 

More, after saying that he accepts the general doctrine of 
“the evolution of organisms,” proceeds to add: “But this is not 
equivalent to accepting the metaphysical hypotheses which at¬ 
tempt to give the causes and methods of evolution, nor does 
it mean that the biological theory of evolution can be applied 
with success to the 'problems of man's mental and spiritual 
nature .” (Page 163.) 

(d) Scientists not Trained in Philosophy and Humanism 

Evolution as understood by scientists has passed beyond the 
stage of a collection of facts and has presumed to dictate terms 
to all the sciences, especially psychology, ethics, education and 
religion. Unfortunately, scientists, though ever so proficient 
in their own line, are, as a class, not professionally trained in 
psychology, ethics, and least of all theology. When they begin 
to philosophize or construct a world-system they make a sorry 
mess of it. As says another: “It is surprising how few biolo¬ 
gists see that the philosophical conclusion of Darwin’s hypothe¬ 
sis of natural selection is a mechanistic monism. The reason is: 
too many men of science are unwarrantably self-satisfied with 
the superiority and certainty of their scientific method and are 
but superficially trained in either philosophy or humanistic 
thought.” (More, p. 255.) 

The public ought to be warned against assuming that the 
current doctrine of evolution is a solid basis for systems of edu- 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


111 


cation, psychology, morals and religion. It is at bottom, despite 
the efforts of Conklin, Coulter, Millikan and Mather to give 
it a theistic twist, an impersonal monism, the view that not a 
Supreme Being or Person, but some eternal force or energy is 
the cause of all things terrestrial and celestial. As scientists are 
at sea regarding the basic principle in their world-view (some 
being quasi-theists, others rank atheists), not a few take refuge 
in the term agnosticism , coined by Huxley and championed 
by Spencer. In the opinion of More this middle ground be¬ 
tween those who hold that life is but another form of force or 
energy and those who hold that there is an unbridgeable gap 
between the organic and the inorganic “includes, I think, the 
majority of biologists and of those who are trying to base 
philosophy and religion on science.” (Page 256.) It was shown 
above that Agnosticism is an untenable position. 

(e) Current Evolutionism Materialistic 
The trend of present biological methods is unquestionably 
materialistic. Professor W. H. Sheldon, of Yale, writing on 
“Soul and Matter,” says: “Materialism, far from being dead, is 
stronger than ever. Science is taken as the source and the type 
of all knowledge; biology becomes a branch of physics, and 
psychology a branch of biology; so it is at least in North Ameri¬ 
ca, where we have practically no vitalists or animists. And this 
after all is straight materialism.” (Phil. Rev., March, 1922.) 

Biology, says Sheldon, is a mechanistic and therefore materi¬ 
alistic affair. Not even consciousness is left, and so the way is 
prepared for the new psychology without the soul. 

(/) The Whole Battle of Evolution to he Fought Over Again 
No less an authority than Dr. C. A. Etheridge, fossilologist 
of the British Museum, says: “Nine-tenths of the talk of evo¬ 
lutionists is sheer nonsense not founded on observation and 



112 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs 
of the utter falsity of their views” Benjamin Kidd writes: 
“The knowledge has come to me that Darwinism, the peculiar 
science of the West, is a compound of astonishing presumption 
and incomparable ignorance” 

That doubt as to evolution has arisen on all sides was in¬ 
dicated in the presidential address of Dr. D. H. Scott before 
the British Association in 1921. After referring to the fact 
that “the Darwinian period is past,” he continues: “We can no 
longer enjoy the comfortable assurance, which once satisfied so 
many of us, that the main problem has been solved—all is again 
in the melting-pot. But now in fact a new generation has 
grown up that knows not Darwin.” It is Dr. Scott who says 
this. But now comes “the unkindest cut” of all, when he asks: 
“Is evolution, then, not a scientifically ascertained fact? No, 
it is not . We must hold it as an act of faith” says Scott. High- 
school teachers and embryonic college professors might well 
look into the subject a little more fully before parading their 
ignorance of facts. 

Professor W. E. Ritter, University of California, writing 
in Science y April 14, 1922, says that one who thinks carefully 
“can hardly fail to see signs that the whole battleground of 
evolution will have to be fought over again, this time not so 
much between scientists and theologians as between scientists 
themselves.” Other proof could be given if space permitted. 

(g) No Aim or Goal in Evolution 

We search in vain in evolutionary literature for a state¬ 
ment of the aim or purpose of suns, stars, minerals, plants, 
animals and man. Why the hundreds of things in the uni¬ 
verse? Do evolutionists present any comprehensive world-view, 
or any view at all? They nowhere speak of an aim, purpose 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


113 


or final outcome. H. Bavinck, the great Dutch scholar, 
writes: “In the current evolutionism nothing is dominant save 
the compulsion of fate or the capriciousness of accident. Even 
in the case of man evolution offers nothing; he exists, but why 
and to what end cannot be told; he remains here for a time 
and then is reabsorbed in the infinite abyss, or, as say the 
French, ‘the farce is ended’ (la farce est jouee). Since there is 
neither soul nor spirit, immortality is folly and faith in it 
mere egoism.” 

(h) Evolution and Man 

After all is said, the supreme question is the origin and 
character of man. Is he the last and highest in an unbroken 
series of life-forms, essentially the same from the amoeba to 
an Aristotle or Newton, or is he of a type differing in kind 
and not merely in degree from the most cunning ape? Is he 
by nature a being created in God’s image and placed here to 
hold communion and fellowship with his Maker, or is he 
an “accident,” as says science, and at death reabsorbed as a 
mere force into the infinite maelstrom whence he is alleged 
to have come? 

It is a momentous question. How shall we answer it? We 
may sum up the matter in the language of Dr. G. H. Howison, 
professor of philosophy in the University of California, and 
ranking as a metaphysician with Royce: “We have reached the 
proof that what is most distinctively meant by Man is not and 
cannot be the result of evolution. Man, the spirit, man, the 
real mind, is not the offspring of Nature, but rather Nature is 
in a great measure the offspring of this true Human Nature.” 
(The Limits of Evolution y p. 48.) 

Similarly a recent statement by Professor Reinke, of Kiel, 
Germany: “The only statement consistent with her dignity 



114 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


that science can make is to say that she knows nothing about 
the origin of man.” 

(i) The Argument from Comparative Anatomy 

It was shown above that, in spite of certain marked sim¬ 
ilarities between man and higher animals, the differences are 
more marked. Alfred R. Wallace was certain that the dif¬ 
ferences are due to a special creation of man. Virchow declared 
that, since apes and men do not mate, they are unquestionably 
of different species. As seen above, Huxley allowed that the 
argument from comparative anatomy fails. 

(/) The Argument from Skulls and Bones 

A few years ago it was affirmed that man’s descent from 
the ape, or at least ape-man, could be proved from fossils. Our 
elaborate review of the evidence discloses that this last line of 
defense has been shattered beyond hope of repair. It turns 
out that the long-sought-for ape-man, or missing link, never 
existed, as even the adroitly arranged “restorations” in the 
American Museum, New York, testify. 

To save the hypothesis from utter collapse, a hypothetical 
ancestor of man is supposed to be represented by “a jaw dis¬ 
covered in Egypt,” according to the ever resourceful Professor 
H. F. Osborn. (Natural History , XX, p. 231.) Beginning 
with the “jaw,” of a million years ago, the history of man is 
traced through one hypothetical link after another up to the 
present. Thousands of innocent school-children and unsophis¬ 
ticated adults visiting museums in New York, Chicago and other 
cities are shamefully hoodwinked into supposing that such fabri¬ 
cations extraordinary are ascertained facts of science. 

The argument from skulls having failed, Osborn, eating 
humble crow, is compelled to say: “Man is not descended from 
any known ape, either living or fossil.” (Op. cit. y p. 231.) 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


115 


But now we are told that both man and monkey are descended 
from a line further back—of which, as to man’s real nature, 
there is not a shadow of proof. 

(k) Self-Consciousness and Personality the Dividing Line 
between Animal and Ma?i 

The animal intelligence of which we hear so much is 
greatly misunderstood. The psychologist Professor E. L. Thorn¬ 
dike writes: “Most books [on animal psychology] do not give 
us a 'psychology but rather a euology of animals. They have all 
been about animal intelligence, but never about animal stupidity. 

. . . Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices 
it or sends an account to a scientific magazine. But let one 
find his way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immedi¬ 
ately becomes a circulating anecdote.” ( Animal Intelligence , 
p. 25.) Similarly Wundt in his “Human and Animal Psychol¬ 
ogy.” 

Man is a self-conscious person; the animal is not. The 
animal has sensation, perception and recollection (not true 
memory) and an elementary form of reasoning, but not reason 
in the true sense. 

“Clever Hans,” a horse trained by a German psychologist, 
could perform wonderful tricks, but he could not originate a 
new or original line of action. If, by any mischance in the 
performance, anything went wrong, the creature was hope¬ 
lessly “rattled” and all had to be gone over from the first. 
During the Chicago World’s Fair, the writer attended an ex¬ 
hibition of trained dogs in one of the large theaters. The 
chief “stunts” required the animals to jump alternately under 
and over a series of bridges. In the second round the leading 
dog made a mistake and jumped over instead of under the 
first bridge. The dogs following did not correct the mishap, 
but were in utter confusion, some jumping over, some under 



116 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


the bridges, others running about in bewilderment, yelping 
meanwhile in a most ridiculous chorus. The scene was so in¬ 
describably amusing that the uproar of applause threatened never 
to cease. The whole performance showed that the animals, 
however well trained, had no power of initiative or of retrieving 
an unfortunate situation. 

The reason is obvious: no animal can say: “I am I,” “Thou 
art thou,” or can by any possible amount of training acquire 
such power. 

(/) Man in a Class by Himself 

If space allowed other cogent proof could be cited that 
man is in a class by himself. Professor James sums up the 
matter in saying that the principle of substantiality of the soul 
differentiates man from the animal and is the only guaranty of 
responsibility and immortality. 

As seen above, the American Association for the Advance¬ 
ment of Science placed itself on record as holding that “every 
scientist in the world” accepts the doctrine of the evolution of 
man from the animal. Scientific bodies, however, have fre¬ 
quently been mistaken in their deliverances, as in the case of the 
British Royal Society when it declared that the power of in¬ 
voluntary movement of a headless turtle was dire heresy, and 
in that of the French Academy when it attempted to overthrow 
microscopic discoveries of scientists. See Whewell’s “History of 
the Inductive Sciences.” Professor O’Toole is, therefore, quite 
correct when he writes anent the “dictatorial proclamation” 
mentioned above that “in view of our uncertainty and ignor¬ 
ance regarding the origin of the human body, it is extremely 
unethical to strive to impose the theory of man’s bestial origin 
by the sheer weight of scientific authority and prestige.” (Of. 
cit ., p. 345.) For a fuller discussion of the subject, see the 



Evolution in a Nutshell 


117 


author’s “Christianity and Falsa Evolutionism ,” Central Pub¬ 
lishing House, Cleveland, O., or Laird & Lee, Chicago. 

Since, according to science, “every living thing produces 
offspring after its kind” (Conklin), thus confirming Scripture, 
man comes under this category. He is a kind or species dis¬ 
tinct on his mental and spiritual side and in his twofold nature 
from an animal. A true and real species cannot be accounted 
for by evolution, but begins with a divine creative act. Over 
against the scientific contention, at once consistent and con¬ 
tradictory, that man, in body, soul and spirit, is descended 
from an amoeba, the true view is stated in the Westminster 
Confession: “God created man male and female, with reason¬ 
able and immortal souls.” Referring to evolution, Thomas 
Carlyle writes: “If this brute philosophy is true, then man 
should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the dignity of 
being moral.” We share this view. 



















































































































































































INDEX OF SUBJECTS 


Actualism, the view that the soul 
is merely a series of states of 
consciousness, held by Hobbes, 
Hume, Spencer, the Mills, func¬ 
tional and behavioristic psy¬ 
chologists, 88-90 

Agnosticism, the doctrine that the 
reality of God, universe, knowl¬ 
edge, is incapable of proof, 61-4 

American Museum of Natural His¬ 
tory, New York, restorations of 
fossil man in, based on parts of 
skulls contained in half-bushel 
measure, 72-83 

Amoeba, the beginning of man ac¬ 
cording to science, 14, 104 

Anatomy, comparative, of animals 
and man, similar structure in both, 
with marked differences; ape and 
man of different types (Wallace, 
Huxley, Virchow, Hamann), 34-7 

Ancestry, early traces of man’s few; 
no common ancestor of man and 
ape found, 81-6 

Andrews Thibet expedition, in 
search of high-brow apes, a water- 
haul, 86 

Animals, intelligence of, overrated; 
stupidity underrated, 115 

Ape, body of, not really upright, 
35-7 

Ape and man, gulf not bridged, 
35-6, 73-4, 111-3 

Battle of evolution to be fought 
over again; all in melting-pot 
(D. H. Scott), 111 

Behaviorism, muscle-twitch psychol¬ 
ogy, latest evolutionistic fad, 107 

Biogenesis, all life from life, 57-8, 
65-8 

Caterpillar, origin of, related to ori¬ 
gin of universe, 103 


Cell, the, key to evolution, accord¬ 
ing to biologists; a life-principle 
back of, 39-42 

Cenozoic era, 31 

Chaos in evolutionism; Darwinian 
period past, 111 

Characteristics, acquired, not trans¬ 
mitted, 44-5 

Conservation of matter and force, 
theory of, challenged, 53-4 

Cosmogony, science of origin of 
universe; Biblical and Babylonian 
compared, 27-8 

Craniology, in unsatisfactory state, 

84-6 

Creation, according to Genesis I and 
II, the calling into being of that 
which was not; specifically the 
divine origination of the physical, 
plant, animal and human realms, 
22-6 

Creation epic, Babylonian, not 
source of Genesis I, 27 

Creation ex nihilo, 26 

Creationism, theistic, doctrine of, 

22-5 

Cro-Magnon man, 78 

Days, creative, 25 

Deism, belief in existence of God, 
but denial of revelation, 54, 
102-4 

Determinism, all things caused by 
inexorable force and fate, 52-4, 
61-3, 105-7 

Devil’s broth, at Dayton, Tennessee; 
too many cooks, 64 

Embryology, study of organism 
from cell to maturity in adult; 
results doubtful, 38-40 

Energy and electrical elements the 
only entities according to science; 
alleged eternity of, 49-51 


119 


120 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


Evolution, meanings of: change, 
progress, improvement} growth 
from germinal to mature state} 
specifically the doctrine of a con¬ 
tinuous, progressive change, ac¬ 
cording to certain laws, by means 
of resident forces pervading the 
whole universe and including psy¬ 
chical, moral and religious 
spheres, to the exclusion of ex¬ 
trinsic or supernatural agencies} 
opposed to creationism, 15-20, 
107-111 

Evolution, theistic, so-called, fails 
to explain what or how much 
God created, 102-4 
Evolutionism compared with crea¬ 
tionism, 98-102 

Eye, human, not an evolution, 39 

Fakes, colossal, anent skulls, 84 
Force. See Energy 
Fossil ape-men in America, 84 
Foxhall man, a myth. 76 
Frauds, fossil, in America: Santa 
Barbara, Los Angeles, Lansing 
man, 84 

Genealogical tree, an illusion, 32 
Genetics, relation of individual to 
parents, 43-5. See Heredity 
Geology, eras and periods of} grad¬ 
ual advance in forms of life with 
many breaks} either creation at 
the beginning or some unaccount¬ 
able missing links (Grabau)} or¬ 
igin of new forms not known to 
science, 29-32 

Goal or aim in evolution, not dis¬ 
coverable, 112 
Goddess Evolution, 65 

Heidelberg man, 80 
Heredity, transmission or non-trans¬ 
mission of characters, 34. See 
Genetics 

Image of God in man, 25 


Java man, now regarded as true 
man and not ape-man, 81-2 

Kind, everything produced after its 
own, 44 

Law, natural, ordaining of, not ex¬ 
plained by science, 53 
Life, either a creation or product of 
the lifeless} all life from life, 
55-7, 67 

Mammals, placental, origin of, a 
mystery, 109 

Man, two views of: either a crea¬ 
tion or evolved from an amoeba, 
24, 92-5, 98-9, 113 
Materialism, doctrine that matter, 
not mind, is the cause of things} 
on the increase, as seen in biology 
and physiology, 111 
Matter, a form of energy, non-ex¬ 
istent} is decomposing, 49-50, 54 
Mechanism, interpretation of life in 
terms of chemical and physical 
force, 65. See Vitalism 
Mendelism: parent cannot transmit 
to offspring an element not pos¬ 
sessed by itself, 45-7 
Mesozoic era, 31 

Missing link between ape and man, 
71, 73, 109 

Monism, doctrine of impersonal en¬ 
ergy cause of all things, 50, 52, 
110 

Motion, origin of, not explained by 
science, 50-2, 104 
Motion, perpetual, impossible, 53 

Nature, a god, 52 
Neanderthal man, 79 
Nebraska man, a grand hoax, 84 
Newtonian and Laplacean view¬ 
points, 19-20 

Ontogeny, development of the indi¬ 
vidual to maturity, 38. See Phy¬ 
togeny 

Paleozoic era, 29-30 



Index of Subjects 


121 


Personality, a riddle for science, 

89, 94, 113 

Phylogeny, development of the race, 

38 

Piltdown man, 81 
Pleistocene or Glacial era, 32 
Preservation and providence, 101 
Propliopithecus Haeckeli, 74 
Protoplasm, physical basis of life, 

56 

Psychology, actualistic, 88-90} be¬ 
havioristic, 105-6} substantialistic, 
89-92 

Radioactivity and dissolution, 54 
Realms, three, 47 

Responsibility and immortality, 92 
Restoration of fossil men, 77 

Scientists not trained in philosophy 
and humanism, 110 
Scopes trial, strange bed-fellows at, 
with conflicting views} settled 
nothing, 61-3 

Self-consciousness and personality, 

115 

Self-determination, 105-7 
Skulls and bones show man in a 
line by himself, 114 
Soul, either an abiding entity or a 
series of states} term discarded by 
W. James, but allowed to be the 
only escape from materialism} 
seat of, in pineal gland (Des¬ 
cartes)} survival of, 87-95 
Species, nature of} do not inter¬ 


breed, as ape and man, 43} no 
ape ever produces a man, or man 
an ape (Virchow), 114-5 

Spontaneous generation, 58 

Substantialism, the view of the soul 
as an abiding entity, substantially 
(though not experientially) the 
same from birth to death} held 
by Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, 
Hegel, Lotze, Bradley, Royce, etc., 
89-95, 107. See Actualism 

Talgai man, alleged to be ancient 
fossil, but in fact an Australian 
youth, killed in 1848—another 
hoax, 73 

Three realms: matter-force, life, 
mind, 22, 48, 55, 68 

Universe, physical, a creation ac¬ 
cording to Scripture, a self-origi¬ 
nated machine according to sci¬ 
ence, 52 

Vitalism, view that life is some¬ 
thing unique not interpretable in 
terms of chemical force, 65. See 
Mechanism 

Western ape-man: tooth of alleged 
man of 500,000 B. C. found to 
be that of Pliocene “bear,” 84 

Will, freedom of, in dispute} either 
man’s power of choice, or under 
inexorable natural law, 105-7 

World-views, two: either theistic or 
mechanistic, 98-9 



INDEX OF AUTHORS 


Alford, Henry, 25 
Andrews, Roy, 75, 86 
Argyll, Duke of, 16, 70 
Ashurbanipal, 27 

Baldwin, J. M., 92 
Bastian, H. C., 56, 69 
Bateson, W., 44, 46, 48 
Baumueller, H., 37 
Bavinck, H., 113 
Bergson, H., 60, 69 
Bernard, Claude, 67 
Boas, F., 85 
Bower, F. O., 33 
Bradley, F. H., 92 
Branca, C., 83 
Brisbane, Arthur, 39 
Buechner, L., 65, 91 
Burroughs, John, 17, 100 

Carlyle, Thomas, 117 
Century Dictionary, 21, 44, 100 
Chamberlin and Salisbury, 29-31, 

45, 104, 109 
Coolidge, Calvin, 24 
Cole, Faye-Cooper, 59 
Cope, E. D., 17, 61 
Conklin, E. G., 17, 44, 54, 81, 

101, 103, 105, 111 

Cornelius, W., 90 
Coulter, J. M., 17, 77, 104, 107, 
111 

Crampton, H. E., 17, 48, 100 
Crookes, W., 67 

Dana, J. D., 23-25 
Darrow, Clarence, 61, 63, 99, 105 

Darwin, Charles, 18, 29, 34, 39 

43-4, 71, 90 
Dawkins, W. B., 82 
Delage and Goldsmith, 44, 106 
Descartes, R., 92-4 
De Vries, H., 39 
Dewey, John, 68-9, 107 


Ditmars, R. L., 75 
Driesch, Hans, 66, 70 
Driver, S. R., 25 
Drummond, H., 57, 68 
Dubois, Eugene, 82-4 

Edman, Irwin, 71, 105 
Eliot, C. W., 19, 48, 100 
Encyclopedia Britannica, 21, 58, 75, 
78 

Etheridge, C. A., Ill 

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 66 
Ford, Henry, 58 
French Academy, 53 

Gegenbauer, C., 38 
Geikie, Archibald, 108 
Goldenweiser, A., 85 
Grabau, Amadeus, 30, 33, 76 
Green, W. H., 26 
Guyot, Arnold, 23 

Haeckel, Ernst, 17, 51-2, 66, 99 
Haldane, J. S., 68-9 
Hamann, O., 37 
Hays, Arthur, 64 
Hegel, G. W. T., 92 
Henderson, L. J., 70 
Hill, R. T., 85 
Hobbes, T., 91 
Hoeftding, H., 91-2 
Hoernle, R. F. A., 69-70 
Holbach, Baron, 66 
Howison, G. H., 113 
Hrdlicka, Ales, 79, 80, 83 
Hugo, Victor, 90 
Hume, David, 91 
Hunter, C. W., 41 
Huxley, T. H., 17, 36, 55, 63, 80, 
111, 114 

Hyslop, James H., 92 
Irving, Henry, 79 


122 


Index to Authors 


123 


James, W., 90-2, 116 
Judd, C. R., 59 

Kant, Immanuel, 67, 92, 103 
Keller, Helen, 94 
Kellogg, Vernon L., 39, 65, 95-6, 
103 

Kepner, W. A., 59 
Kew, W. S., 85 
Kidd, Benjamin, 112 
Knight, C. R., 77, 83 

Ladd, G. T., 99 

Lafayette, Marquis, 79 

Laplace, Pierre, 20, 104 

Lankester, Sir Ray, 81 

LeConte, Joseph, 17, 30, 44, 55, 68 

Leibnitz, G. W., 92 

Leuba, J. H., 17, 62, 99 

Lewes, G. W., 68 

Locke, John, 50 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 16, 53 

Loeb, Jacques, 66 

Lotze, Hermann, 92-3 

Lull, R. S., 55, 81 

Macnamara, J., 80 
Malone, D. F., 64 

“Mather, K. A., 59, 61, 64, 81, 82, 
95-6, 101, 105, 111 
Ma> well, J. C., 52 
McCann, A. W., 58 
McConnell, T. J., 63 
McGregor, J. H., 73, 83, 85-6 
Mendel, Gregor, 36, 45, 81 
Micou, R. W., 66 
Mill, James and John S., 91 
Millikan, R. A., 101, 105, 111 
Mills, John, 49 
Moleschott, W., 91 
More, L. T., 40-3, 49, 52, 54, 67, 
109, 111 

Morgan, T. H., 39 
Muensterberg, Hugo, 91 

Naegeli, W., 56, 69 

Nelson, W. A., 59 

Newman, H. H., 59 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 20, 67, 107, 113 


Ormond, A. T., 92 
Osborn, H. F., 17, 56, 69, 72-5, 77, 
79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 114 
O’Toole, G. B., 85, 116 
Otto, Rudolph, 66 

Patten, W., 19, 47-8, 61, 77, 98, 
100, 106 
Plato, 92 
Pratt, J. B., 50 

Reinke, J., 66, 70, 113 
Ritter, W. E., 112 
Royce, Josiah, 92, 113 

Sayce, A. H., 28 

Schleiden, Dr., 40, 42 

Schneider, Professor, 66 

Schwalbe, O., 78, 80-1 

Schwann, W., 40 

Scott, D. H., 112 

Scott, W. B., 34-5 

Seth, J., 107 

Seward, A. C., 33 

Sheldon, W. H., Ill 

Sidgwick, A., 39 

Small, R. T., 64 

Smith, N. K., 98 

Spencer, H., 18, 46, 63, 68, 90 

Spinden, H. J., 74 

Spinoza, Baruch, 90 

Standard Dictionary, 21 

Stark, A. S., 84 

Stevinus, 53 

Stout, G. F., 92 

Sully, J., 21 

Tait, Professor, 49 
Tansley, A. G., 33 
Thomson, J. A., 47, 69, 110 
Thompson, W. H., 94-6 
Thorndike, E. L., 115 
Trendelenburg, Adolf, 92 
Tyndall, John, 67 

Usher, James, 26 
Ulrizi, Hermann, 92 

Van Loon, H., 77 



124 


Evolution in a Nutshell 


Virchow, Rudolph, 36, 68, 116 
Vogt, Carl, 91 
Volckmann, W., 94 
Von Baer, O., 18 
Vries, H. de, 39 

Wallace, Alfred R., 35, 84, 114 
Ward, James, 15, 20 
Watson, J. B., 107 
Webster’s Dictionary, 15, 58 
Weismann, Aug., 38-9, 81 
Wells, H. G., 20, 77, 82 


Whewell, W., 116 
Wiggin, T. B., 100 
Wilder, H. H., 76 
Wilson, E. B., 38, 43, 55, 68 
Wilson, Woodrow, 24 
Wolf, W., 66 
Wolfe, A. B., 106 
Woodruff, L. L., 55 
Woodward, Smith, 84 
Wundt, W., 91, 113 

Zerbe, A. S., 70, 116 


VITA 


Born, Reading, Pa., October 27, 1847} student Ohio Wesleyan U., 
1864-7} A. B., Heidelberg Coll., Tiffin, O., 1871} Ph.D., Ill. Wesleyan 
U., 1879} S. T. D., Ursinus Coll., 1893} studied U. Leipzig, 1885, U. 
of Chicago, 1894, Columbia, 1908. Asso. editor Christian World, Cin¬ 
cinnati, O., 1873-5} adj. prof, mathematics and ancient langs., Ursinus 
Coll., 1875-9} prof. Greek, German, French (successively), Heidelberg 
Coll., 1879-88} prof. Hebrew and Old Testament Theology, Heidelberg 
Theological Seminary, 1888-1907} prof, systematic theology, Central Theol¬ 
ogical Seminary, Dayton, O., 1912-21} asso. editor Reformed Church 
Review 1921—. AUTHOR* Europe through American Eyes, 1886} The 
Old Testament a Book for our Times, 1888} Genesis and Geology, 1900} 
The Hammurabi Code and the Book of the Covenant, 1905} Darwinism 
and Evolution, 1908; The Antiquity of Hebrew Writing and Literature, 
1911; The Sub-Conscious in Psychology and Theology, 1912; The Soul 
Here and Hereafter, 1913; Post-Millennarianism and Pre-Millennarianism, 
1919; the Supernatural Conception of Jesus Christ, 1921; Coueism and 
Mental Healing, 1923; Christianity and False Evolution, 1925.— Who*s 
Who in America, Vol. XI. 































































































































































































































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